


how could you sleep at a time like this?

by dos_mierdas



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Adopted Keith (Voltron), Adopted Sibling Relationship, Angst, Assisted Suicide, Beware, Bilingual Lance (Voltron), Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Blood, Child Death, Corpses, Death, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gay Keith (Voltron), Ghost Keith (Voltron), Ghost Sex, Haunted Houses, Implied/Referenced Incest, Inspired By American Horror Story, Keith (Voltron) Angst, Keith (Voltron) Has Issues, Keith (Voltron) is So Done, Keith (Voltron) is a Mess, Keith/Lance (Voltron) Angst, Lance (Voltron) is a Dork, M/M, Pining Lance (Voltron), Very kind of, Yes., but it's just rumors!, kind of, not exactly, not so graphic but it's there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-09-24 07:16:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 31,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20354524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dos_mierdas/pseuds/dos_mierdas
Summary: “Aance!” she blows spit bubbles and Lance’s jaw drops. “Laaaa!”Bella didn’t even say mama. That’s the first time she’s had a go at any of their names at all.“I felt bad because… because you were so surprised,” Keith shrugs as if it’s not a big deal. As if he’s not a fucking ghost teaching his baby sister words like that’s not the weirdest and most amazing thing at the same time and holding her like he isn’t a ghost holy fuck. “I’ve been trying to teach her all your names, but she doesn’t say them as well”A… nice... ghost?“Keef!” Bella says happily, as if that solves everything.__Or: Lance moves into a haunted house and befriends the ghost living there, as Lance does.Title is from Message Man by Twenty One PilotsOtherwise titled "I love American Horror Story and making Keith suffer. Yes, you can quote me on that"





	1. Moving In

**Author's Note:**

> So... Keith's a ghost. Lance falls in love with him. 
> 
> So they're going to suffer. A bunch.
> 
> I don't think it's too graphic, but in later chapters it's explained what happened and some descriptions of blood. Also, Keith's family in this isn't exactly abusive but they're real shits, if you don't want to read that. There's also mentions of his bones in the last chapter because I couldn't resist so... read at your won risk! Also I know nothing about adoption, here it just... happens. Also ghost logic that I myself barely understand.

Isabella, or baby Bella as Lance liked to so fondly call her, was one of the fussiest babies he’d ever had the pleasure to encounter. 

Bella was undoubtedly the prettiest and cutest face to _ ever _ grace the McClain family line, but she was incredibly particular about her needs and wants. 

In the first place, it was close to impossible to get her to stop crying once she’d started, wailing on and on like a siren whose off button had disappeared, and it appeared her ability to be content was restricted to when she was being held in any shape or form like a sack of floppy potatoes. She was also a lot like Luis in the way that she could only stand particular smells and textures regarding food and clothing, whining and shaking in distress when she was taken out of the house into new places. 

And that was just during the day. 

Once night fell and mama was too tired after a hard day’s work, it was up to the eldest siblings, including Lance, to try and get her to sleep through the night and let them all get some rest for once. But that was never going to happen, as all things planned ever went smoothly, and eventually they'd resigned themselves to an unstable schedule where suffering was the default motion. It had taken a while to get used to waking up at odd hours of the morning only to get drooled on, ending up wetter than Frog the dog’s toys and getting guilt-tripped with big ocean eyes into singing mama’s lullaby over and over again until Bella fell asleep. 

It was how coffee became an absolute must for them to function in the mornings. 

So, with all of this information, it made sense that when Lance first heard they were moving, he thought it was absolutely, for sure, _ definitely _ the most idiotic idea to ever cross someone’s mind, never mind that it was their mama who came up with it, intelligent woman as she was. Like, come on. Baby Bella taken out of her house? Somewhere new that wasn’t the restaurant rounding the corner of their street? 

Definitely a bad idea. 

Regardless, being the good son that he _ obviously _ was, his whining and stomping around like the teenager he was became reduced to the absolute minimum. If mama said they had to move, they were moving even if the apocalypse decided to come upon them as they were packing their bags. 

It was hard saying goodbye to their home, but in the end, even if tears were shed and walls caressed like the cheeks of soldiers before they were sent off to war, Lance decided it was the people in the house who made it a home, as did the rest of his family on their last dinner under the roof that had covered them for so long. As adults, there was only one thing they were all truly worried about: how would Bella take it? 

The car ride was… okay, to say the least. They had to deal with the radioactive and deadly smelling poop Bella produced like clockwork and some crying and slapping of tiny hands against tired faces, but it could have been a _ lot _ worse considering the circumstances, and the car ride, in the end, was the least of anyone’s worries. It was only once they arrived at the new house that they held their breaths as mama carried the baby inside, ready for a tantrum but hoping against hope that maybe being settled firmly in her mothers’ arms would be enough to sooth and slowly wean her to the ambient of new house. 

Lance personally cared very little for the ‘mood’ of the house, or whatever Luis had been ranting about for like an hour before they arrived, but, once he’d unloaded and was carrying the first box into it behind mama, he was starting to understand what his brother had meant. It was an old but beautiful structure, big enough for a family double their size and some extra padding on the sides. 

Even if he wasn’t an architect, he could tell the house was created to almost... loom over them, and Lance had the weirdest sensation of being watched or, more particularly, judged. But he justified the feeling as a byproduct of being nervous and stressed because of the move. 

As mama slowly opened the door, Lance and his siblings braced themselves for the commotion, feet restless and ready to jump in before…

Before…

Before…

Nothing?

To say Lance was shocked wouldn’t do justice to how confused he felt in that moment. 

Along with Veronica, he was frozen still behind their mama, almost dropping the boxes and shattering whatever fragile thing was inside in pure amazement as Bella looked around the house without making a single annoyed sound. This was the very same baby that had cried for an _ hour _ when they had to change the detergent and her toy was washed with a different scent, the exact baby that screamed and jerked like a bull whenever they entered a restaurant that wasn’t their usual. 

Bella was in a completely new environment and she didn’t make a sound.

That was the first of many signs that there was something either close to perfect or extremely wrong with that house.

* * *

  


“Veronica, would you please stop reorganizing my things? I haven’t even had the chance to organize them in the first place!” 

“I haven’t even been to your room!” Veronica yelled back.

Unbelievable. 

Veronica, as sweet a person as she could be, was a shit housemate because she declared every single fucking thing around hers like a hoarder with a vengeance. Mama had banned her fiddling with Luis’ things because of his _ thing _, and that, unfortunately for Lance, left her to appropriate every single square inch that was left of the house, moving everything around like puzzle pieces to a picture Lance didn’t have access to.

She’d calmed down a bit through the years though, and at least they didn’t have to share a bathroom anymore. 

But it appeared the new house made her territorial streak flare up back again. Lance had gone to take a piss for a minute, a _ single fucking _ minute and she’d taken the chance to strike like a junkie begging for a fix. When he’d stepped back into his room, the pile of books he’d left on the bed was now in neat stacks on the desk and _ Alice in Wonderland _ had been left open beside it, and the records he’d been organizing from most to least played had been stacked beside them-

“Alphabetically!” Lance yelled down the hall, knowing immediately it was her and not Luis because Luis wouldn’t touch his things with a ten-foot pole if he could avoid it. “Who the fuck else sorts thing alphabetically!”

Veronica popped her head out her door, leaning on the frame and raising a mocking brow. “By artist or album name?”

“Uh…” Lance quickly checked. “By artist?” 

Rolling her eyes, she stepped back into her room for a second before coming out holding her own stack of discs. “Mine are sorted by album name, _ pelotudo _”

“Veronica! Don’t call your brother that!” their mama yelled from downstairs. Lance laughed and stuck his tongue out but then she yelled again. “And Lance! Say fuck again and you’re doing everyone’s plates for a week!”

“_ Yaaaaa! _” They yelled and went back into their rooms, obviously not before glaring and flipping the bird across the hall to each other.

That first incident could’ve passed as a mere accident, and it _ was _ between Veronica and him so mama probably thought they were full of shit and just trying to pull each other’s hair or something. But later that night, as they were having their first dinner at the new table, Luis waited until they were all done and the laughter had died down before asking if they’d taken the cereal bars from his room.

“Lance!” their mama scolded immediately. 

“What are you yelling at me for?” Unbelievable. He turned to glare at Veronica. “Is this some elaborate plan to get back at me for rightly accusing you of touching my things?”

“No! What the hell Lance!” she was frowning. He could tell Veronica was telling the truth. They were both horrible liars, it was a family trait they’d always shared. 

“Luis, I’d _ never _ take your bars I swear,” then he turned to his mama, hands raising exasperatedly. “I don’t even like those things!”

For a second the table was silent as their mama considered them. Even Bella was silent, the weirdo, munching on a teething toy like there was no tomorrow. After staring at them like criminals, finally she sighed and accepted defeat. Even if she hadn’t been a psychiatrist, their mama knew her children were all terrible liars, having seen through all their bullshit years ago, so she just sighed and told Luis they must’ve misplaced the box or something.

Yeah. Weird.

After dinner, as Lance changed Bella’s diaper before bed he frowned down at her. She normally liked squirming around and peeing on him when she was changed, but now she was completely silent, blowing bubbles up at him.

“Why you so quiet, huh? You tired baby?” But Bella wasn’t even looking at him, her eyes were intensely fixed on something over his shoulder. As he finished up, he waved his hand over her face, but she refused to look at him, smiling and babbling at whatever she was fixated on.

“You weirdo,” he cooed as he put her into bed. “You must be tired… or holding out on the next big tantrum, huh?”

Bella burped as an answer.

Knowing for a fact that Bella would start crying and he probably wouldn’t sleep a wink, Lance went to bed warily but quickly, trying to get some hours in before fate doomed his beauty-sleep. But that was logic talking, and Lance had never really been a logical person, so he laid back and played on his phone for a while, reading about good restaurants nearby and texting some friends. 

As it often happens, one minute he was looking at a news article about the house and the next he was blinking his eyes open to a dark room and sheets pulled over his shoulders. He yawned loudly, thinking Bella had probably woken him up by crying and bracing himself to get up and go calm her down. But before he could even sit up, he noticed the house was deadly silent… unusually silent for two in the morning, in their case. 

Huh. Someone had probably gotten to her before he’d fully woken up or something, stopped her crying as he opened his eyes. Feeling lucky, he shifted deeper into the covers, yawning as his eyes made their descent into fully closed, blinking slower and drawing lower and lower.

Just as he was on the brink of sleep, he heard singing, male singing. _ Luis must’ve gotten to her _ , he thought as he yawned one final time. _ That’s weird, it’s normally me or Veronica. _

As he lost consciousness, lulled by the sweet voice, a small realization dawned on him. 

It didn’t sound like Luis.

* * *

As they ate breakfast the next morning, their mama suddenly called for their attention. 

“My precious kids,” she smiled. “I’m so proud of you, taking such good care of your sister”

“Yeah, Luis,” Lance nodded at his brother. “By the time I got up she’d already stopped crying. How did you get to her so fast?”

Luis frowned up at him. “What?”

“I didn’t know you sang so well, what the hell?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play coy with me man,” Lance laughed a little as he watched Luis’ blinking face. “I’m trying to say thank you”

“Lance,” Veronica stepped in, watching him wide-eyed, looking as confused as Luis sounded. “You slept through the night?”

“Of course I did,” he stopped eating then, gesturing up in the general direction of Bella’s room. “Well, I woke up for a second, but Luis had already gotten to Bella. And then I heard him-“

“Lance,” Veronica was dead serious now, and Lance didn’t remember shutting up so fast ever since his mama caught him humming a song about ‘_ death and depressed people’ _ for Bella. “Luis and I both slept through the night. He told me this morning he’d never slept as good in a while”

Luis shrugged. “We thought it was you” 

As if those five words didn’t make chills run down his spine. 

The table was silent for a few seconds, air so dense even Bella stopped chewing on her toy. She looked up at them and babbled something incomprehensible when suddenly their mama laughed, cutting the tension with a knife.

“You silly kids,” she slapped the table a little and they all slowly joined in on her laughter, even if Lance’s laugh was hesitant and motivated by pure confusion. “I don’t really care who it was, I’m just glad you took care of her”

Lance, Luis and Veronica all looked at each other warily as their mama stood up from the table to get ready for work. 

“Weird joke,” their mama laughed breathily as she goes, completely oblivious or just dismissive of the tension between her children. “Appropriate for you weird kids”

“Yeah, Lance,” Veronica laughed even though she was still frowning a little, shaking her head as if trying to reprogram it. “Real funny”

“But I-“

“Just accept the thanks, _ imbecil _,” she huffed as she picked up the plates. 

“Thanks, Lance,” Luis smiled tightly, also stepping up from the table.

And there he was. Sitting alone on the table with gears working a million a second.

Maybe he… maybe he sleep-walked to comfort her? Yeah, that must’ve been it. He hadn’t sleep-walked since he was ten, but maybe when he woke up it was from the impact of flopping down face-first onto his bed after calming Bella down. Weird but… possible. There was only one thing that didn’t fit into that story.

It was a loose thread that had his brain burning all through the day and then all through first period the next morning on his first day in the new school.

Who the hell had been singing at three in the morning?

Thankfully, he didn’t have to wait long for an answer when a hunk of a boy named Hunk and a girl who didn’t look like one named Kate sat with him at lunch. They were both nice, asking about his day and how he’d been settling into the neighborhood and school and every frequently asked question to the new kid. An easy conversation all around until about half an hour in when Hunk asked him where he was living. 

The girl, who asked him to call her Pidge before Lance could even call her Kate a first time, dug her elbow so far into the guy’s ribs it practically disappeared, scolding him for being so obvious. 

Lance laughed, reminded of how Veronica smacked him upside the head when he said something ‘inappropriate’. “It’s alright,” he assured Pidge, “I live right up Westchester Street, in the big old house almost at the end before the park”

“We know,” Hunk glared right back at Pidge. “That’s scary man. I don’t get how you could take that house. Just knowing-”

“_ Dude _,” Pidge shoved him again. “How dense are you?”

“What’s wrong?” Lance frowned. Oh _ shit _ . He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he knew precisely where this was going. “Come _ on _. Please tell me no one died there”

“Sorry man,” Hunk shrugged, looking at him with wide eyes. 

Oh god. “Someone _ literally _ died there?”

“How’d you _ not _ know? It’s a bit of a ghost story around here. Right now you’re like, celebrity’s boyfriend level”

So that’s why people had been looking at him weirdly. Great.

“It’s the Kensley house,” the girl explained. “Nobody knows the exact details, but the short story is the couple that lived there some years ago went batshit crazy and killed all their kids. There’s rumors the house has been haunted ever since that day, but honestly? Some say it’s been haunted for way longer than that, that ghosts drove the Kensley’s insane enough to kill their kids. I don’t think so, even if it’s true the couple that lived there before them moved pretty quickly too”

Lance was going to be sick.

“Oh, you’ve seen something, haven’t you?” Pidge’s eyes lit up, somehow curious instead of afraid.

“I don’t know yet,” Lance confessed. “But that would make… so much sense of things that have been happening around the house,” and then he told them about that first day. How baby Bella, the fussiest and most particular baby in the world, had been the most relaxed he’d seen in her short life inside the house, how his books have been moved around and albums ordered and what had happened that night.

“Dude, singing?” Hunk shivered. “That’s fucking creepy”

“I thought they were playing some elaborate prank or I’d sleep-walked or something, but now I’m not so sure anymore,” Lance sighed, burying his face in his hands. “ Was one of the kids a boy?”

“Sure,” Pidge shrugged. “It was a pretty big family, homeschooled or something, but my brother saw them at the park once years ago. He said the oldest were a boy and a girl who were… close, to say the least”

“Rumors said they were incestuous or something,” Hunk added as he continued to eat. “Super gross”

“Then there was another boy who was a little younger than them-”

“Keith!” Hunk shook his head in disbelief. “I remember him! When I was little I saw him outside the grocery store with my mom. They were pretty antisocial, so it was like seeing a ghost”

“Thank you Hunk,” Pidge rolled her eyes. “Then there was a girl about the same age as him and two more boys. Twins, I think. And the last one was a girl about two years old. Very sad about them”

“That’s awful,” Lance sighed. “But that would make sense. It explains my things getting shifted around and food going missing. My mama yelled at me for leaving candy wrappers on the kitchen floor, but there’s no way I could’ve eaten them in the middle of the night because I’m the clumsiest person that exists. And there’s absolutely no way I sleep-walked down the stairs without rolling down them too”

The bell caught up with them and their conversation was cut short as they went back to class. 

Lance was left to wonder about the Kensley’s. 

Later when he got home, he stood staring at the tall windows and braced himself to go into his new home.

_ Here we go again. _

  



	2. October

To say Lance was freaked out would be the understatement of his life. After learning about the house’s past, he went to sleep that night the way little kids do after their first scary movie: lying straight as a rod with a nightlight on while having a strict staring contest with the ceiling until he passed out from exhaustion. 

As soon as he blinked his eyes open the next morning, he sighed, surprised he’d survived another night in a haunted house. _ See? _ he told himself as he went down the stairs to have breakfast. _ It’s not so bad. _

And then he realized that the rest of his family were all extremely, suspiciously well-rested. For any other family, this may be a positive occurrence, a normal one even. But the McClain’s being well-rested could only mean one of three things:

  1. Bella suddenly decided to do a complete one-eighty in terms of behavior and slept through the night without comfort for the first time since she was _born_
  2. Bella died in the middle of the night (which was impossible due to the fact she was currently blowing spit-bubbles in his mama’s arms across the table)
  3. Someone took care of her. Someone who wasn’t any of her siblings or mother.

Taking into consideration the grateful smiles from his siblings, he guessed it must have been that last one and he started to freak the fuck out again. There was no way Lance was sleep-walking, he refused to believe that, and that only left one possibility as their alarm hadn’t been set off: someone inside the house, that wasn’t any of the McClain’s, was taking care of Bella at night. 

This was way, way, _ way _ worse than he’d expected. 

Lance could feel the paranoia starting to seep in slowly but surely as he smiled back to his mama, not wanting to scare any of them by saying _ hey, isn’t it weird none of us woke up? _ Until he was walking out of the damned house, he felt every nerve pulling at his heart-strings like a harp, building his breath and heart into a pace he couldn’t keep up with.

But Lance had never let nerves render him useless. And as he mulled it over, he started to turn the fright into curiosity.

Throughout the rest of the week, he attempted to make as much sense as could of the situation, and the desire to understand drove him to a frantic obsession. Every break, he’d go to the library with Hunk and Pidge and read every paper on the Kensley’s family murder and follow-up, trying to figure out everything he could. As his friends had warned, there wasn’t much information in the first place, but that only made it worse. With every new detail he wrote down, the need to understand only grew stronger.

Somewhere between his coffee fueled days and horror-filled nights, his body acquired the ability to twitch practically non-stop, eye flashing like a broken light-stop in a perfect recreation of a cartoon. As if approaching a rabid dog, Hunk once cautiously asked if he’d had any sleep. He probably looked completely manic because of the hysterical laughter he couldn’t help but let out.

_ Yes! _ He barely held back from screaming. _ I’m sleeping perfectly! It’s not right! _

But his week of research paid off. Lance dared to say he’d learned everything there was about the Kensley’s. 

It was sad, how it all started as a simple love story.

Marissa and Stephen Kensley were a normal couple, high-school sweethearts and married before they were even out of college. They were classic Christians, the couple next door that would definitely lend you sugar if you asked nicely, perfectly tolerated by the town with the always-present exception of a minority that called them weird and rude. 

In this case, the minority was right.

Throughout their thirty years of being together, they amounted to a grand total of seven children. Nicholas and Abigail were the oldest at twenty and nineteen, and the only unnatural thing about them were rumors claiming they were incestuous. The next were Keith and Vivian, a quiet and anti-social seventeen-year-old and a sweet girl only a year younger than Keith who committed suicide two years before the massacre. The youngest were eight-year-old twins Will and Graham and baby Sophia, only two-years-old at the time of the murder. 

A two-year-old.

It was horrifying. 

And it only turned into even more of a horror story as he read on and asked around. 

When prompted, an old woman at the grocery store told him there were rumors Stephen Kensley had incestuous relationships with all of his children, supported and hidden by his wife. Unfortunately, or fortunately Lance guessed, after investigators inspected and turned over most of the house, there was no evidence found for the accusations. 

They did develop a storyline for the crime, though.

It happened on the twenty-second of February, approximately eight years and eight months before the McClain family would move into the house. What was supposed to be a normal Friday night resulted in the lives of six children being taken from them before they could even drink legally. Crime scene investigators found blood on most of the children’s beds and on the floor of Sophia’s room, and as there were no gunshots reported that night suspected they’d been stabbed.

When they were caught, the Kensley’s gave no explanation to the police or to the multiple psychiatrists that visited them in jail for why they’d done what they did, probably too embarrassed to confess. The only thing they declared was they did it on a Friday so they’d have time to dispose of the bodies and make a run for it. 

Their plan almost worked. The kids were pretty antisocial, no one would’ve noticed them missing until it was too late and their bodies were already buried or disposed of in a ditch somewhere, their parents completely off the radar. But what they hadn’t counted on was for a friend of Keith’s to go knocking on their door only to find the house empty and spattered with blood. 

The police caught them at a gas stop some miles off west and they were promptly arrested for the murder of their six children. They were both justly sentenced to life in prison but, unfortunately, the bodies were never found. 

Lance had the awful feeling he knew precisely where they were. More precisely still, he could probably tell you on what property they were buried in. 

Unfortunately for him, he and his family were currently living in that property.

It was weird knowing the rooms his siblings and mama were sleeping in had all been blood-splattered, that the frames of the very beds they lay in were once of the six dead children probably haunting their home. The only silver lining he could find was that was his room, _ Keith’s _ room, was the only one they hadn’t found any blood in, the only one that hadn’t been a murder scene.

Lance was thinking about when he came back from school, watching the windows as he’d taken to in an attempt to see shadows hanging behind them. As he put the keys in, he stopped. There was a strong, deep voice coming from inside the house followed by another, fainter one. For a second he thought it was Veronica and Luis talking, but unless they’d completely changed their tone of voice and speech patterns in, say, a _ day _, that was impossible. 

Still, one of the voices sounded… weirdly familiar, though he couldn’t really pinpoint where from. Maybe he’d heard it at school or somewhere around town.

Well, _ that _ was bullshit. Who was he trying to fool? Lance knew _ exactly _ where he’d heard that voice before. 

Pushing the door open feeling like the anti-hero racing against time in the last arc of an action movie, he stood on the other side only to see a guy he’d never seen before in his life standing in the middle of the room. The boy, or man if he ever saw one _ holy shit _, had been facing the stairs when he came in only to turn around at the sound of the door opening, looking like a kid caught taking a forbidden treat from the cookie jar. 

Stranger fucking danger. 

“Hello?” Lance squeezed the doorknob, ready to bolt if the wall of a man dared to make a misplaced move that could be read as aggressive. _ Christ _ , he was _ huge _ . Lance had to seriously start working out again, he was looking like a spaghetti cut in half. _ Vertically _. “Who are you?” 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the man raised a hand to shyly rub at the back of his neck. He was… hot. _ Very _ hot. And still huge. He looked like a god standing in his house in a clean white dress shirt and jeans. But he had a kind face, if a little haunted-looking, matching perfectly with his house. 

Shit, he was getting distracted. What was going on?

_ STRANGER _ , his mind supplied. _ IN YOUR HOUSE. YOU SHOULD PROBABLY PANIC. _

“I’m Shiro. I’m just waiting for your mom, she told me I could come in if the door was open”

_ Okay, don’t panic. _

“Ohhh,” that woman was quick. They’d only been there a week and she’d already gotten new patients, kudos to her. Lance let go of the door. “Sure. Sorry for startling you. She’s probably already getting back from the store. She’ll be a few minutes, though”

“I know,” Shiro said a little quickly, and Lance couldn’t help but raise a brow in a low imitation of Veronica’s perfect questioning stare. 

_ Panic maybe? _ His mind supplied once more. 

“I mean-” the man fiddled a little with his hands. _ Nervous _ , Lance thought, _ interesting _. “I warned her I’m always early. Not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse yet. Sorry for startling you, you probably thought there was a break-in”

“Don’t worry man,” he stepped forward cautiously to shake Shiro’s hand. “I’m Lance. If you’re getting here early all the time, you’ll probably be seeing a lot of me”

“Nice to meet you, Lance,” Shiro smiled warmly for a second before he suddenly fell a little forward, almost as if he’d tripped. 

“What was that?” Lance laughed. So superman was twitchy too. Weird.

“Uh… sorry,” Shiro laughed awkwardly, fumbling his cell phone out of his pocket. “I was just... talking. On the phone. It was important, so I have to get back to it”

“Oh. Sure,” Lance assured. “I’ll be upstairs if you need anything”

“Thanks”

Lance wasn’t a psychiatrist like his mama, but if he’d learned something from her, his siblings and looking at himself talk shit in the mirror, he’d learned how to spot a liar. 

And Shiro was definitely one. A handsome and nervous, shifty and twitchy liar, but a liar nonetheless. Aside from that, he looked like a genuinely nice guy, but there was something very weird about him, like he had this big stick up his ass and it was making it hard for him to sit still, in which case the stick was the secret. It was only when he’d put his music on and dropped his keys on the desk, next to an opened book of course because fucking ghosts were living in his house, that he noticed.

The door had been locked. He’d heard the click of the key turning the mechanism when he opened it coming into the house...

_ She told me I could come in if the door was open. _

Okay. _ Very _ sketchy. Lance was not leaving the statue-man to wander around his house without supervision. 

And then he remembered again: the _ second fucking voice _. He must’ve forgotten at the scare Shiro had given him.

Leaving the music on to cover his footsteps, he made his way sneakily down the corridor to watch Shiro until his mama got home. He didn’t know what to expect from a man that had somehow gotten into his house with the door locked, but when he leaned over to watch down the stairs he was definitely creeped out. 

Shiro was sitting on the stairs, leaning against the wall and talking. 

To himself.

Well, that’s what it looked like at first.

And then Lance saw it.

Either Shiro was absolutely batshit crazy, or Lance had begun to hallucinate too, because even though the rails of the stairs were thick and covered most of the view, he could see a ... shadow? Mirage? _ Something _ was leaning against the rails next to Shiro, something dark and shifting and, unless Lance’s ears were suddenly picking up sounds from the next house over somehow, _ talking back _. Because of the loud music, he couldn’t hear much of what they were saying, and though he could see Shiro’s lips moving he couldn’t tell for sure if the figure was making sound too. 

Was that a _ ghost _?

“What the fuck?” he blurted out, standing in an attempt to see. 

Shiro shot up too as Lance almost tripped twice making his way down the stairs, but when he got there the thing had already disappeared. 

Oh God. The stick up his ass that was a secret was a fucking _ ghost _.

“Lance,” Shiro smiled, looking more confident than before, phone hanging from his hand next to his leg. “I was just talking on the-”

“Did you see that?” he demanded. “You were talking but… there was someone here, right?”

A look of realization crossed Shiro’s face, but it was quickly masked by confusion. Fake confusion. “I don’t know what you’re talking-”  


“Don’t lie to me,” Lance demanded, searching for answers in his grey eyes. “There’s been some weird shit going on in this house since the first day. You have to tell me if you saw anything. If you-”

Shiro’s eyes were shifting to look over his shoulder to somewhere behind him, mouthing something so subtly Lance almost missed it. But before Lance could call him out on it, or turn around for that matter, the door was opening and his mama waltzed in holding Bella in her arms with that god-awful timing that she had. 

As soon as she saw them, the baby started babbling.

“Eeeffff,” she called and blew raspberries. “Eeefff,” she’d taken to saying that. Veronica and him had a bet on whether she meant teeth or leaf. 

Baby Bella’s adorable nature was distracting, yes, but even if he was a man on a mission, there was nothing Lance could do with his mama there. At least not at the moment.

Shiro blinked in surprise for a second before he smiled charmingly at his mama and the baby, going over to introduce himself properly and leaving Lance with a million questions behind him. His mama passed Bella over and quickly dismissed him, telling him to go change and feed her and ignoring his wild gesturing to Shiro and finger swirling next to his forehead because yes, Lance was _ very _ mature. 

As they went into the office, he looked around the room for a second, wondering where the ghost had disappeared to.

“If you’re there…” he warned, tightening his hold around Bella and ignoring her tiny hands slapping his face. “You better be nice to my family or I’m going to exorcise you _ so _ hard”

Lance felt brave for a single second as he marched up the stairs, but he started running the moment he heard a huff of laughter behind that didn’t sound like Shiro at all. 

Oh God. Lance hoped he hadn’t pissed off the ghost. 

Lance hid in Bella’s room as Shiro’s hour went by, taking the time to feed and change her like mama had said and then playing with the soft toys thrown all around the room in a vague attempt to distract himself. But as soon as he heard the door swinging shut on the first floor, he threw Bella over his shoulder and practically flew down the stairs, yelling none-too-coherently at his mama about the door being locked. 

“Oh, _ cariño _,” his mama laughed, waving him off as she continued her way to the kitchen. “I’m sure you’re just being paranoid. The door was probably already open and you just thought it was closed. Shiro’s a sweet kid, I don’t think he’d do that”

“But _ mama _,” he whined like the mature person he was. 

“But _ Lance _,” she mocked, going about her routine as if her son wasn’t having a nervous breakdown behind her.

“He was talking to _ himself _,” Lance briefly considered telling her about the shadow but kept his mouth promptly shut, afraid she’d think he was the one gone mad. “He said he was talking on the phone but when I came back… he just wasn’t, okay? And then when I asked him about it he kept looking over my shoulder like there was something behind me, muttering like a madman!”

“Lance,” she motioned for him to sit on the kitchen island and reached a hand across it. “I can’t tell you much okay? But Shiro… he’s been through a lot. Some years ago he lost a really close friend to… real unusual circumstances. And he suffers from PTSD because of things I can’t tell you. Him talking to himself may just be a coping mechanism, it’s something a lot of widows do, too. Nothing out of this world, okay?”

Why did she have to make so much sense?

“Were they together?” he couldn’t help but ask and his mama rolled her eyes.

“It’s none of your business…” she glared a little but smiled fondly. “But no. If you want to pursue something-”

“_ Mama no _!” Lance pulled his hand away, shaking his head. “He looks nice, but I’m just curious about it okay? It’s… weird”

“Okay, sweetie,” she slapped her hands on the table. “Now help me put the groceries away like a good son, okay?”

Lance sighed and did as he was told, but he couldn’t help but wonder…

_ Lost a close friend to unusual circumstances... _

“Mama?” he asked as he put some cans in the pantry. Lance wasn’t telling her about the ghosts, but he _ could _ ask her about the house. “Did you know… about the house? About what happened before we came here?”

His mama sighed, looking at him with tired eyes. “Yes, _ cariño _. I knew. It’s why the house was so cheap. It was a long time ago, and I didn’t mind so...”

_ Lost a close friend to unusual circumstances... _

“And that friend… ” Lance swallowed, weighing if he should ask or not. “Here?” She nodded. “I know it’s none of my business but… is it really good for him to come over?”

“It could be beneficial to him, yes,” she continued to pull bread and more cereal bars for Luis out of the bags. “And yet-”

“It’s none of my business, I know”

“Good boy”

* * *

  
  


There seemed to be a lot of indescribable moments happening lately, and there, lying in his bed and staring at the ceiling like it was the most fascinating thing in the world to avoid looking at his desk where another book had been left open, he began to entertain the stupidest idea he remembered thinking of in a while. 

Brave was never a word he’d used to describe himself, but right now it consumed him as he considered.

There were probably ghosts in the house. More than probably actually. There were probably absolutely _ definitely _ ghosts in the house. And Lance, it by this sudden bravery, had the brightest plan to try and catch one of them. Well, maybe catch wasn’t the most appropriate word, but Lance wanted to at least see one and live to tell the tale. He wasn’t sure if it was a semi-conscious urge to prove there were no such things as ghosts and he was definitely being ridiculous so he could sleep soundly at night, or if it was a weird desire to prove they _ were _ real and then…

Well. He didn’t really know what to do if he found out they were real.

With his heart in his throat, Lance waited, playing mind-numbing games and drinking cold coffee until his digital clock proclaimed it was TWO AM, the average time for Bella to wake up demanding attention. 

And thus, Lance grabbed the baseball bat he kept beside the bed and walked down the corridor to his baby sister’s room, starting to execute his not-as-thought-out-as-he-would’ve-liked-but-was-still-going-through-with plan. 

Standing outside the door, he was about to open it when he noticed two things: 

  1. The door was already open, left so closely joined that it looked shut.
  2. Footsteps were coming from inside the room. And singing.

Footsteps and singing. 

Fucking superb.

Lance gripped the baseball bat tighter, hoping against hope that maybe it was Veronica or Luis in there, maybe even his mama instead of a fucking _ ghost _.

There was only one way to know. 

Holding his breath and with eyes closed shut, with a shaking hand he reached towards the white wood, pushing so carefully and slowly with the pads of his fingers that it didn’t make a sound as it revealed the room inside. Lance took the slightest step forward, gripped the bat tighter and waited a second before opening his eyes to see a boy standing with his back to him and staring out the window, a kid holding onto his leg.

A boy that definitely wasn’t Luis and a kid that couldn’t be Bella.

Lance couldn’t move. 

The sound of the baseball bat clattering against the floor snapped him out of his shock and his mouth practically unhinged as the boy turned around to reveal Bella was sleeping peacefully in his arms. His baby sister had her head cradled against black hair over a pale neck, drooling a stupid smile at the arm wrapped around her back and settled gently on her neck. 

Fucking traitor.

Dark blue eyes fixated on him, blinking slowly as arms tightened around his baby sister as if Lance was the stranger holding onto his baby. He remembered looking at a picture of the kids on one of the newspapers, faces blurred but particular. For a second he thought maybe he’d gotten it wrong and it was a girl holding his sister. Vivian maybe. But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the flat chest and Adam’s apple came into view and confirmed it was a boy. He was handsome and… pretty at the same time, somehow.

Well. For a-

“Ghost,” Lance swallowed, the panic settling in finally. Plop, like a rock dropping into still water. “_ Madre Santa _”

“Uh…” the boy shifted his eyes around, looking nervous. He looked surprisingly normal, standing there in a black shirt and jeans and not knowing what to say. There was even a red plaid flannel swung over his shoulder under Bella’s head, and the image of him taking it off before swinging it there and picking up his baby sister was so normal, Lance didn’t know what to think about it.

Oh. The ghost was still holding Bella.

“G-give me my sister,” Lance put on what he hoped was a brave face, going into protective mode and reaching out to try and get closer without getting too close. As soon as he did, the girl that had been hiding behind the boy’s legs ran off to the side, ignoring her caretakers’ cry of _ Sophia _ and seeming to disappear into thin air. 

Sophia. The two-year-old.

The boy blinked at him, apparently realizing the position he was in, and stepped forward to give Bella back to him. It was an awkward exchange given Lance was freaking the fuck out, but as the boy tried to push her away and into his arms, she woke up and started to whine. Lance thought for a second that this was what had been happening since the first day, that this boy had been sneaking into his baby sisters room and holding her as she slept and that’s why she hadn’t been waking up crying. 

But it seemed the story wasn’t quite right, because as the boy tried to get her to let go of his hair and started transferring her to Lance, Bella said her first word.

“Keef!” she babbled, refusing to let go of the tuft of hair in her tiny fist. “Keef! Keef!”

Keith. All along, she’d been saying fucking-

“Keith?” Lance whispers as they hold Bella up together.

“Yeah,” the boy nods and swallows hard, finally getting the baby to release his hair. He stands there for a second, seemingly looking for something in Lance’s eyes. “Sorry,” he whispers back, pulling his flannel off his shoulder and pushing an arm through the sleeves as he runs out the room with another small whisper-shout of Sophia.

Lance looks down at Bella and Bella looks back up at him.

“Keef,” she protests one last time, big and furious eyes blinking quickly.

And then, for the first time since they stepped into the house, Bella starts crying. 

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keith!


	3. November

When he wakes up the next day, Lance wants to think it was a dream. 

_Maybe I was so paranoid I sleep-walked to baby Bella’s room, _he thought as he tried not to trip down the stairs. _Like_ _Leo Dicaprio in Inception_. 

But it appeared reality wasn’t in accordance to his deepest wishes, as per usual, because as he shoved cereal into his mouth and tried to rub the sleep off his eyes at the same time, his mama threw a napkin at his face. 

She liked to call his attention and reprimand him like that sometimes, a proper multi-tasker like him. “I heard Bella crying,” she prompted, curious of the first time she’d heard her daughter at night they’d moved in. 

That’s how he knew it was real.

It was then, sitting on the table with milk spilled down his shirt, a napkin in his hair as he lied through his teeth to reassure his mother, that he realized he had to find out the truth. Once could be an accident and two a bizarre coincidence, but if Lance saw Keith a third time he’d either developed paranoid schizophrenia or his house was definitely haunted.

Haunted by Keith. Kensley number three.

Aside from being absolutely, thoroughly disturbed, he guessed it was good to finally be able to put a name to the face. Despite all the sneaking around and moving belongings all over the place like an episode of hoarders, the ghost hadn’t been hostile in any way, at least from what Lance had gathered from living more than a week in the house.

And he was no expert, but having people living in your house and ignoring your very existence and sleeping in your bed must be annoying as all fuck, so he could understand why Keith would want to be hostile and was thankful that he wasn’t. 

Yet. 

He couldn’t even begin to imagine how life was when… well, when  _ dead _ . How frustrating could it be to see a stranger lay in your bed and waste away thumbing at a ridiculous game while his life had been taken away?

Lance considered all that, which he decided to maturely and accurately call ‘ghost-logic’, as he waited for the sky to darken. 

Which was forever apparently because of how anxious he was to see what would happen, and no amount of stupid games or texting or reading could distract him now. 

Even Veronica commented on how quiet he was at the table.

“I have three questions,” she declared, finishing her plate. “Who the hell found your off switch, how is it possible they did as I’ve been searching for it for  _ years _ , and can they please tell me where it is or at least allow me access to it?”

Luis laughed and Lance cranked out his own nervous bout of laughter. 

“Sorry,  _ fea,’ _ ” he shrugs, not in the mood for joking. “I was busy calming Bella down so I’m a bit tired. Being the only one that notices her crying is mood-dampener”

Luis snorted and his sister went all red in the face, which was always a win. It was a little harsh, but Lance was way too on-edge to apologize for the unjust burn. “I don’t get how you wake up, it’s like her crying was knocked down to a whisper or something. That or maybe you found  _ her _ off switch. Care to share with the group, Lance?”

Lance shrugged and they left it at that. 

This time he couldn’t even make it to two in the morning, which was honestly already more than enough patience in one day because the p-word wasn’t really in his dictionary. He was up and wandering to Bella’s room like a drunk at midnight sharp. _ I’m Cinderella,  _ he thought, trying to be sneaky as he opened the door to reveal a shadow inside.  _ I guess this must be my prince. _

The paranoia was so intense it seemed he’d stopped making sense altogether. 

“Hello?” he called out wearily, trying to hide the shake in his voice as much as he could and be  _ brave _ dammit.

This time Keith’s turnaround was more controlled. The first thing Lance noticed, because he was a nitpicker like that, was the neck of his shirt was pulled and disgustingly wet from where Bella was playing with it.

Keith blinked at him, apparently not knowing what to say. He could relate to that, and they watched the other in silence, waiting for someone to make the first move.

A noise by the boy’s feet broke their brief staring contest, and there was that little shadow again, tiny hands messing around with some hoops and sticks on the floor. 

“Sophia?” his brain supplied, and the little girl immediately looked up, looking half-curious and half-scared. Keith immediately stepped around to hide her from view protectively, the movement shifting Bella in his arms who noticed Lance at the doorway and started waving her tiny hands around like she was trying to chase fireflies. Cute.

“Aance!” she blew some spit bubbles and Lance’s jaw dropped open. “Laaaa!” 

Bella didn’t even say mama. That’s the first time she’s made an attempt at  _ any _ of their names at all.

What the _ fuck? _

“I felt bad because… because you were so surprised,” Keith shrugged. 

As if it’s not a big deal. As if he’s not a fucking  _ ghost _ teaching his baby sister words like that’s not the weirdest and most amazing thing at the same time and holding her like he isn’t a _ ghost holy fuck _ . 

“I’ve been trying to teach her all your names, but she doesn’t say them as well”

A… nice... ghost?

“Keef!” Bella says happily, as if that solves everything.

“You’ve been reading about me,” Keith continued, gesturing with his head towards Sophia. “Well, about us. About what happened”

“Yeah,” Lance swallowed hard, still not completely sure if any of it was actually real. “But there’s not much really”

“You know our names,” Keith wiped some of Bella’s spit from her chin with the edge of his collar. “And our ages. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have recognized Sophia. Or me, for that matter”

Something happened then.

It could’ve been the stress of the situation as a whole, or the sudden existential realization that there was life after death in some way that restructured the whole system of belief Lance had developed through the years. Or it could’ve just been the fact that Keith was a nice ghost, standing right there after giving him the scare of his fucking life. All of the frustration and research and running around the house feeling eyes on him feeling crazy and there Keith was and he just couldn’t take it.

Something in Lance snapped. 

“I know you’ve been moving my things around!” every memory flooded his brain at the same time: the books and the music and the food and the shadow and the singing and Shiro and  _ everything _ . And suddenly he was angry and scared and just mad as  _ hell _ . “You can’t just do that!”

“I  _ don’t _ ,” Keith glared at him. “I only look at the books”

“What about the food?” 

“That’s the twins!” 

“Well, tell them to stop!” 

“I do! But they don’t-” Bella whined at the angry tone of his voice and Keith sighed deeply. “You have no fucking idea all the things I do around this house,  _ my _ house for that matter. I’m sorry that my running around like a- like a fucking housewife isn’t enough for you”

Keith wasn’t a nice ghost. He was an asshole ghost.

“Oh,  _ helping _ ,” Lance mocked. “Is that what you call stealing all our food? Starting fights between us by moving shit around?”

“Don’t fucking swear,” Keith hisses.

“You just-” Lance wanted to punch something. “You know what? Fuck you, man. Everything you’re doing is an invasion of our privacy!”

“I already told you-” 

“And- And you can’t just hold her every night!”

“What?” Keith protested, arms tightening around Bella. “Why the hell not?”

“Because that’s spoiling her!”

“But she-” Keith looked down at the baby and it took less than a split second for every trace of anger to vanish from his face, blue eyes softening as he smiled, brows furrowing down. Oh no. Oh  _ hell _ no, how could the asshole ghost be fucking cute? 

“She cries,” the boy says simply. Even if they’re only two words, they make chills run down his spine. How can someone add so much weight to two words? Lance was still angry, but God was he curious too, and there were so many things he didn’t understand backing those words up. “I can’t-” a look crossed his face. 

_ Haunted _ , Lance’s brain supplied.  _ Keith looks haunted. _

“I can’t stand it”

And just like that, like a match in a windy night, Lance’s fire died out as quickly as it started. He looked at Sophia holding onto Keith’s legs and suddenly a realization hit him like a ton of bricks. 

They were both kids and they were dead. They’d been  _ killed _ , for god’s sake, their bodies probably not even been buried properly. Lance looked at Sophia and wondered how anyone could even do that. He knew what it felt like to lose a father, but he couldn’t imagine anything worse than losing a child. And Lance loved his family so much… how deranged did one have to be to kill their own blood?

“What happened?” was all he could think to ask.

But Keith wasn’t making it so easy for him.

“I don’t-” Keith closed his eyes and his frown got deeper, probably reliving that awful day. He shushed Bella one final time before slowly lowering down onto her crib, patting her stomach so she’d lie still and grabbing his shirt from where he’d swung it over the rocking chair. “I’ll just leave you alone, okay? Is that what you want? I’ll- I’ll try to get them to stop messing around with your stuff”

“Wait-” 

But Keith had already grabbed Sophia’s hand and disappeared from view. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


A week passed since the first time Lance saw Keith.

The first few days he tried to naively ignore what he now referred to as  _ The Incident _ in his head. He’d thought it could all go back to normal, or at least to what was supposed to be normal. But as the days passed, it was… weird. 

It hadn’t been that long, but Lance had grown used to misplaced books on his desk and music playing by itself on the radio, to Veronica complaining of the TV changing channels by itself or the case of the disappearing remote. He even missed his mamas lectures about leaving doors open in the middle of the night, and when there wasn’t a crick out of place or any self-opening door and she wasn’t yelling down the hall it felt more supernatural than any moaning bedsheet could. 

The only things that didn’t seem to stop after The Incident were the random candy wrappers strewn all over the kitchen floor and Frog barking at random dark corners like a maniac or chasing around the after-thought of soft footsteps around the house. 

Luis rationalized it as always, promptly declaring they were finally settling into the house and getting rid of the jitters of living in a new place. 

“We’ve just been forgetting the little things,” Veronica shrugged one day when he asked her about it. 

“But have you heard what happened in the house?” 

“Are you really suggesting the house is haunted?” she looked serious for half a second before bursting out into laughter. “Oh, Lance. Come on, we’re  _ adults _ now, or at least we’re supposed to act like we are. Do you  _ actually _ still believe in ghosts? Or is this another one of your pranks?”

“What? No!” Lance protested. “I’m serious this time!”

“Like that time with the aliens in the backyard?”

“Oh, come on!” that had been a good joke, though. 

“And that time with the werewolf?”

Also really funny. “That was years ago!”

So yeah. Being the best joker in  _ existence _ made it hard to be taken seriously. 

Anyway.

Lance hadn’t dared going back to Bella’s room at night since that day, regretting what he’d said to the boy, but he hadn’t woken up to her crying either, so he knew  _ Keith  _ was definitely there. It was weird lying in his bed at night knowing that to be an actual, real-life fact, unless maybe the whole thing was a dream. He felt like an idiot sometimes straining his hearing to see if he could maybe listen to Keith’s footsteps pacing around or his hushed voice cooing nonsense. 

It was hard not to think about it at all, to pull the metaphorical pillow over his head, shut out the world and knock himself off. The sheer curiosity was driving him mad, but he couldn’t find the will to go see him again. Everything was just too dense and too weird, denser and weirder than he’d ever had to deal with in his life. In the end, he’d gotten what he wanted: confirmed ghosts were real and haunting his house and mostly stopping them from messing around.

So he should be able to forget about it, right? Get over it and all that?

But no. Apparently, life just wasn’t going to cooperate. 

All through the week, he couldn’t stop thinking about them, about Keith and Sophia and the rest. He thought about what they’d been doing for nine years and he wondered if they could even leave the house, wanted to ask if they starved even though they were unable to die. He just kept thinking and thinking and thinking, and every single thought came with a new question he couldn’t answer by himself. 

His mama commented on how somber he looked. That’s probably what happened to anyone who spent their entire week _contemplating_ _death_.

But there was a silver-lining beyond whatever ghost-logic related questions he could come up with. After weighing the pros and cons, he concluded the McClain’s moving in must have been a blessing to the Kensely’s, even if it didn’t feel like it at first. 

Lance imagined Keith all those years in the empty house, bored out of his mind day after day of staring at dusty rooms, nothing to do but carry Sophia around trying to entertain her. He imagined how nice it must’ve been to listen to music after so long, the irresistible itch to read books that were just  _ there _ , even if they weren’t his. Of course he’d be tempted to move things around, maybe if just to feel the weight of them in his hands.

The cover of the first book left open on his desk suddenly popped into his head. 

Alice in Wonderland. 

And then he realized Keith wasn’t even reading to entertain himself, that instead he’d been reading to Sophia. The dam broke then, and with every image that popped into his head, the disappointment grew exponentially. 

Clear as day, he could hear the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs and see the look of disappointment on Keith’s face, feel the headache from trying to read quickly, until the last second before Lance got to the door. The boy wouldn’t have had time to put the book in the pile, instead leaving it facing up so he could at least finish the page as he apologized to the little girl pulling at his hair and for having to stop reading to her. 

He felt the stress of standing behind Luis as he watched TV. Of course Keith would grow frustrated when the only thing it played were reruns from so many years ago, shows he’d already seen and couldn’t care less about. It would be impossible to resist changing the channels, watch the latest news and movies with the latest special effects, sequels he never knew existed and had been dying to catch up to.

And that was just Keith. For all he knew, there were five more Kensley’s living in the house. Letting them roam around and read the newspaper was the least they could do after forcing them into hiding and restricting them was cruel, and his mama had always raised her children to be kind. What kind of monster didn’t let eight-year-old orphans and a two-year-old dead girl take some sweets from the cupboard?

Lance wanted to apologize.

It was as he was lying in his bed thinking of how to do it when he heard the door open and voices coming from downstairs. Lance had gotten home early, and he’d been wearing headphones without playing any music, a calming technique Luis taught him years ago. Keith must’ve thought he wouldn’t be able to listen to them talking, but he recognized his and Shiro’s voices from downstairs. 

Oh, shit. He hadn’t thought about Shiro in a week, how could he forget? 

A plan started formulating in Lance’s head. Well, he couldn’t really make much of a plan as he didn’t have time before his mother got home, so he decided to throw the plan-making out the window and improvise like a true McClain.

Grabbing the last book that had been left open at his desk, he tried to rush as quickly and silently to the stairs, feeling excited to see Keith again. But when he got there, he noticed Shiro leaning against the rails with the boy in question standing in front of him, Sophia in his arms. 

Lance was about to speak when he realized they hadn’t noticed him yet.

Mama taught him manners, yes. But she also taught him to be curious.

“... want me to ask her?” Shiro was asking in a concerned voice.

“I’m fine, Shiro,” Keith shook his head as Sophia pulled at his hair, trying to dislodge her tiny fingers. “It makes sense. Every time the baby cries I just-” he turned his head to look at the girl with a frown. “It sounds just like that day, you know? I can’t just stand there and listen… it makes me anxious. I feel crazy sometimes” 

“You’re not crazy,” Shiro put a heavy hand on Keith’s tense shoulders and he leaned into it, the sharp points lowering into a gentler slope, calmer. “I get it. It makes sense that it bothers you. I just wish I could help you more”

“You don’t have to worry about me, I’m fine,” Keith tried to smile but he just looked tired. “ _ We’re _ fine. It’s just a matter of time before they… before you… It’s just hard to wait when we were so close. The twins are getting restless and I’m-” he stopped when Shiro winced.

“You could just tell him-” the man tried.

“No,” Keith cut him off quickly. “He wouldn’t understand. I just… I just wish Nicholas and Abigail could help”

“You could try calling them?”

“They won't even try anymore. They resent me because they were the ones looking over them the first year while I…” they both looked down at that. “Yeah. They just can’t help me anymore”

Shiro took a deep breath, preparing for something big. “What about Vivian?” he said slowly, hesitantly.  _ Oh _ , he thought,  _ the girl who’d committed suicide _ . Lance almost forgot she’d died on the same house too, even if it was two years earlier than her siblings. “I’m sure if you-”

“ _ No _ , Shiro,” Keith sounded angry. They’d talked about this before. “I can’t keep trying. Vivian’s… she’s…it’s not good for her”

“Mama?” Sophia perked up, patting Keith’s cheek a little, and Lance paled. “See mama?” 

“No baby,” Keith apologized, glaring at Shiro. “Mama’s tired, remember?” 

“Mama like this,” she told Shiro, pulling the end of her lips down. “Eyes leaky. Like Bella. Can’t see me”

“Yeah, baby,” Keith kissed one of her chubby cheeks, smiling a little. “But I’m here, okay?”

A silence stretched between them and Lance’s mind was going a mile a minute as he processed the new information. So Sophia wasn’t the Kensley’s youngest daughter, she was  _ Vivian’s _ daughter. The puzzle pieces were beginning to fall together in his mind, making the bigger picture known even if he didn’t have time to gather all the corners yet. 

Sophia looked so much like Keith… with those same dark blue eyes and ridiculously adorable fluffy black hair.  _ There were rumors they were incestuous or something,  _ Hunk had told him that first day. What if it wasn’t the eldest children that had been having unnatural encounters? Lance hoped he was wrong but it would make sense.

Too much sense. 

To avoid driving himself mad, Lance took the chance to make himself known. “Keith,” he called out.

They both turned their heads in his direction, and Lance was stunned for a moment about how similar they looked, how precisely coordinated their expressions were. It was only the third time he saw Keith, but he was still surprised about how normal he looked. Even in the sun-lit room, he was just like any ordinary boy. Lance could picture him walking the halls at his school, another random face in the crowd. 

“What do you want?” Keith glared up at him, metaphorical hackles immediately up. “I’ve done what you asked, haven’t I?”

“I know, I just-” Lance swallowed, looking between the two of them. He remembered the book at his side and held it forward, a peace offering. “I wanted to say sorry”

“Sorry?” 

“Yeah,” Lance made his way down the stairs quickly and approached the three of them slowly, a stab of guilt hitting him as the little girl hid her face in Keith’s neck. He held out the book with shaking but determined hands. “It’s for Sophia”

Keith didn’t speak, but Shiro stepped forward to take the book. “That’s very kind, Lance. Thank you”

“What do you want?” Keith repeated, still looking away, but at least his voice was a little less aggressive this time. 

“To take back what I said,” Lance looked on at him determined, but he still swallowed hard when the boy finally looked up at him, daring him to continue. “It was unfair asking you to stop being curious about our things. I can’t live without my phone for a day, I can’t imagine what it’s been like the last nine years without…”  _ food and games _ “... without…”  _ friends or books and sunlight _ “... just without. You don’t need my permission to do whatever you like. This is your home after all”

Keith watched him carefully, calculating in a way that probably meant he was trying to work out his intentions, to measure his honesty. Lance was struck again by how young he seemed, how side-by-side they looked the same age even though Keith had lived through so much more than he had. 

“Shiro, Alice!” the little girl said, reaching for the book in his hands. 

“I have a lot more books than that,” Lance smiled. “And a lot more music too”

Keith sighed and gave him a controlled smile.  _ Bingo _ . “Okay,” he relented. “I’ll take it. But it takes more than  _ Alice in Wonderland _ to get my forgiveness”

“I get it,” Lance opened his arms, ready to become his errand-boy if that’s what it took. “What can I get you?”

Keith smirked, a shine in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. “A pack of Marlboro reds would be amazing”

Shiro sighed and Lance laughed. 

“You’ve got it”

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keef.


	4. December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> beware of the tags, some descriptions of violence this episode but there's happy times to balance them out

Lance always loved collecting merchandise.

There really wasn’t a concrete, deep explanation as to why, pop culture and brands were just exciting to him in a way impossible to express aside from plain obsession. There were so many Coca Cola shirts in his closet he could probably open a store and live off it until his timely demise, and that didn’t even compare to his Marvel and DC collection of socks. 

Yes. Socks.

The Harry Potter books on his shelves were on the edge of dissolving on his bookcase, Percy Jackson novels were so abused it looked like they’d been through a hurricane raining chainsaws. Only three months in and his bedroom walls were barely visible under the many posters he’d been steadily covering them in, shelves peeking through them looking like they were stolen from the Disney store with how they burst with collectibles. 

Telenovelas, regular TV shows, movies... he was up to date on everything _ . _

So after Shiro went in for his session, Lance sat on his bed with a notebook and asked Keith what he wanted to watch, two pens on standby for when he ran out of inc. He expected at least three pages filled with sequels he’d never been able to watch and new albums from his favorite artists, maybe a couple books and even some ideas to browse new stuff from. And Keith does name a couple of albums and movies, but he’s surprised to find the list doesn’t even reach half the page so he offers to catch him up on some of the things he personally liked, to which Keith confessed that he’d never really watched much anyway.

_ What do you mean, _ Lance had asked naively, not expecting the blasphemy that the boy would spell on his room that very day.  _ Don’t you want to know what Disney’s been up to? Or Marvel? _

“I never really watched Disney movies. And what’s Marvel?”

“WHAT?” Lance almost dropped Bella from where she’d been hanging out in his arms and she had the audacity to slap him for the loud noise. 

_ Bella _ , he wanted to explain,  _ Keith’s fucking insane _ . 

But Keith just snorted like a disapproving bull and promptly stepped in to catch her. He heard his mama yelling from somewhere in the house not to yell, hypocrisy at its finest, and cleared his throat to ask why and how and pray to whatever gods he could think of to save Keith’s miserable soul.

“We didn’t really get out much,” a dark look crossed his eyes and Lance made a mental note to ask him about it some other time. “We...uh…” 

“It’s okay,” Lance rose up on his knees and clapped his hands together dramatically. “We’ve got a  _ lot _ to do”

Over the course of the next month, Lance barely got out of his house.

At school, he’d write down everything he could think to show Keith when he got home, taking suggestions from Pidge and Hunk in the process. As confused as they were, they indulged him, curious as to his excitement about popular culture all of a sudden. They asked about why so many times Lance ran out of lies, but thankfully they had the mercy to stop asking eventually. 

Apparently, Hunk was an avid TV watcher, and he knew what was good, bad and so-terrible-it’s-actually-good there was to watch. Pidge most of all watched them amusedly, making fun of their likes and dislikes like the evil gremlin she was, but from time to time, she’d collaborate on websites where recent movies were available, illegal of course, and drop a name none of them had thought of yet.

_ Genius, _ Lance couldn’t help but say.  _ I know,  _ Pidge would reply, not looking up from her phone. 

At home, he’d hole up in his room for hours on end, sitting on the edge of his bed with Keith by his side and Bella on his arm, a laptop balanced between their legs. They’d watch movies and series and anime and youtube, packs of different sweets and sodas strewn around them in towers as Keith munched on something different as they completely annihilated the mac’s poor battery. Lance’s eyes felt like they’d fall off by the end of their binges, his stomach sore and head pounding, but it was so worth it.

And after so many hours of sharing space, Lance found out Keith was such a particular person. How could one describe him?

_ Quiet _ , Lance thought,  _ quiet and still like he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s there _ . 

Even when Lance would laugh his head off, feel his stomach rolling and the need to pee from how funny some scenes in sitcoms or whatnot were, Keith would barely shift in his seat in reaction. Lance had been worried he didn’t find the things he was putting on funny, or that he’d fallen asleep, but then he started daring to watch him. At first, it was only a shift of his eyes, quick enough to see and not get caught. 

And then Lance realized what was going on.

Keith was completely immersed, eyes wide and unblinking, fixated on his screen as if looking away would cause it to shut off. His body was a tight string, spine straight and barely touching the headboard behind them, hands folded over his lap if they weren’t holding one of Sophia’s between them. And his  _ face _ . The longer Lance stared the more he noticed. Keith wasn’t emotionless, wasn’t cold or calculating as he’d initially thought. He just had the strangest humor paired with the most depressing way of expressing it:

Microexpressions. 

Lance remembered reading about them once. If it wasn’t anger or frustration, Keith’s face appeared not to know how to twist to accommodate the feeling. It was always restrained, a small trickle ready to burst into a tsunami. When something was funny, it was a spectacle to watch how his big eyes crinkled and the edges of his mouth trembled, tilting up and back down, so  _ twitchy _ . 

His brows were weird, too. They seemed set to only one motion: frowning.

When he was happy a character finally found their happiness or angry that the main character was dead? 

Keith frowned. 

Disgusted at the blood flying like confetti in a horror movie or someone's guts spilling out of their stomachs?

Keith frowned. 

Even when his eyes looked a little wet as the girl wasn’t able to be with the man he loved, ding ding ding! You guessed it! Keith  _ frowned _ . 

At first, the only way Lance would know if the boy was enjoying the things he put on were small comments after the movies were done about how cool the score had been or how gross a character had acted. It was based on those comments that, in his head, Lance started making a list of the things Keith liked and the ones he didn’t, adjusting their schedule based on that. 

After almost two months of perfecting the formula, most of what Lance hit play on Keith  _ adored _ , his eyes turning more and more expressive with every minute that passed. 

Lance imagined one could learn to control every motion of their face except their eyes. It was the only thing that betrayed when one wasn’t really happy or telling the truth. And Keith’s eyes were scary dark but so blue somehow. They looked so beautiful, even in the pale glow of the unnatural screen.

Wait. Since when did Lance rant poetic about ghost boy’s eyes? That was weird. But then again, he’d been feeling weird since Keith appeared in his life. Or... he appeared in Keith’s death? Whatever. 

Even his mama was getting worried. 

_ “Ay, hijo _ ,” she’d shake her head disapprovingly. “I know you love your sister, but you’ve been holed up for almost two months now”

And what could he say? 

_ Sorry, mama. I’ve been teaching a ghost teen that lives in the house the wonders of Studio Ghibli! Oh and he’s the one who’s been helping Bella go to sleep and say all of our names! Her first word wasn’t keys, it was Keith! And those cigarettes you keep glaring at me for are for him! Oh, and did I mention he’s a ghost? And there’s like five others living in the house too? They’re the ones that have been stealing all the sweets and stepping on the flowers outside! They’re what Frog keeps barking at!  _

What he said instead was: “It’s hard making friends?” 

Which was the wrong thing to say because: “Hard making friends?” his mama glared at him. “Who are you and what have you done with my son?”

After that, Lance seriously considered telling her, because ghosts would make a lot more sense than the excuses he was coming up with. It had been especially hard to hide the cigarettes. As he ran outside, Veronica took one look at the box in his pockets and rolled her eyes so hard he thought they would pop out of her head and roll down the corridor just to accentuate her point.

“Seriously, Lance?” she mocked. “I knew you were dumb but not  _ this _ dumb”

“What are you talking about?” he tried to play, as she’d called him, dumb. But she wasn’t having any of it.

“Those things will kill you,” she said, seriously this time.

Lance couldn’t help but burst out laughing. 

Veronica just kept looking at him as if he’d lost his mind, which was fair.

“Bye Veronica,” he singsonged, heading to the spot Keith had found in the backyard. The boy was already sitting behind the gazebo, head leaning back against the wood.

“I just noticed,” Lance said as an opening, and Keith tilted his head up to raise a brow at him. “Don’t you have any other clothes?” 

“Uh…” Keith looked down at his black shirt and red flannel, and either Lance was crazy or he saw a little self-conscious shifting around. “Not really?”

_ Lance McClain, you asshole. _

“This is a very weird place for a gazebo,” Lance tried again, sitting down beside him and handing over the pack of cigarettes and lighter as a peace offering.

“The Kensley’s were a weird couple,” Keith shrugged, imitating his tone, but his eyes looked dark.

As he lit up the cigarette, Lance laughed to himself, sparking himself a raised eyebrow in question. “Those things will kill you,” he quoted, and Keith let out his version of a laugh, which was a stuttered huff of laughter made of smoke and a  _ very funny, Lance _ . 

And it was, kind of. Sitting there, he couldn’t help but stare out of the corner of his eye. As movies portrayed them, one would imagine a ghost would be little more transparent, a little airier even. Watching Keith smoke was amazing and oddly ironic. 

“Was this like, your spot or something?” Lance prodded. Keith knew everything about his life because boy, was Lance a ranter, but Keith never let out many details about his. 

Unfortunately for Lance, that seemed to be the wrong way to go about it.

“Not really,” Keith blew the smoke up, frowning and sighing like he was in a soap opera. “This wasn’t really… here. Before...uh. Yeah”

“What do you mean?” oh, boy. Lance had a bad feeling about this.

Keith turned his head to look at him with a deadpan look. “Lance”

“Keith?” he tried, but he didn’t want to ask if-

“I’m buried under the gazebo”

“Oh…” What did one even reply to  _ that _ ?

“Yeah,” Keith laughed sarcastically. “It’s why our bodies were never found”

“It makes… sense, I guess,” Lance coughed, not trying to diffuse the tension so much as he wanted to redirect it. After nearly two months of hanging out and making small talk, Lance was officially desperate for some information on Keith’s life. One of the many times Shiro came to visit them, Lance asked him about it. But all the man did was shrug and shake his head. 

_ It’s Keith, _ he’d said as if that explained everything.  _ You can’t push him into it. You have to just… listen. It takes time. _

Time. Lance could do time, he’d played the silent game with Luis for about two weeks once after an argument about food. But it had been two  _ months  _ already, this was honestly getting ridiculous. Seriously, after two fucking months  _ this _ was the first bit of information Keith gave willingly? About his death?

_ Listen _ , Shiro said.  _ Just listen _ . 

Okay. Lance could do that too.

“I read about you,” he started again. “In the newspapers and magazines, but there’s barely any information,” he turned his head to check on the mood, but Keith was smoking peacefully. “It must have been awful. I can’t imagine-”

“They stabbed us,” Keith said suddenly, but it was controlled, a perfectly-timed bomb.

That wasn’t really what Lance had been asking, but he could work with that. “Where?” he turned his head completely then, hoping Keith would do the same, but the boy kept facing stubbornly ahead.

“Stomach,” the hand that wasn’t holding his cigarette traveled down to raise the edge of his shirt to reveal a thin white scar. It wasn’t dissimilar to an appendix surgery scar, only it was on the other side and looked much longer than it was supposed to be, as if it had been dragged. “Covered our mouths and gutted us like animals. Even-” he stopped, taking a deep, shuddering breath. “Even the kids,” he said in a small voice. 

Christ. Lance had to cheer Keith up immediately or he would feel bad for the rest of his life.

“It’s Christmas soon,” Lance blurted. Keith turned to look at him at that, searching for something in his face. “Will you come?”

“I can’t not go,” Keith fiddled with the box, taking another smoke out and lighting it quickly. “Can’t leave the house, you know?”

“I know,” Lance still didn’t look away, wanting Keith to look at him again. “But will you come anyway?”

Inhale, hold, exhale. After several long moments, Keith finally turned. He wasn’t crying, but it looked like he was a half-second from bursting. And then Lance remembered what he’d been talking about with Shiro that day so long ago, the question he hadn’t brought himself to ask about Sophia but had been hanging on the edge of his consciousness for the last two months.

_ Now _ , his brain said. 

“Your...” Lance braced himself. “Your daughter can come too”

Keith blinked at him. 

_ This is it _ , Lance thought.  _ Me and my big mouth have officially ruined-  _

And then he burst out laughing. 

Wait. What the fuck?

He expressed the very sentiment in a series of disjointed syllables and tried begging with his but Keith juts kept on laughing like a maniac. Asshole.

“Keeeeith,” he insisted again. “Come on, man”

“Oh my god!” Keith kept on laughing. It was the most perplexing and most adorable thing Lance had seen at the same time, even if he didn’t understand what was so funny about it. Thoroughly giving up, he took the time to watch Keith’s face twist with mirth, eyes crinkled and nose scrunching up, not able to control his features for once. 

A few minutes passed before he finally calmed down.

“ _ Now _ will you tell me what’s so funny?” Lance asked hesitantly.

“She’s not my daughter,” Keith punched his shoulder as he said it, pulling a face as he realized something. “Wait. You thought I slept with my  _ sister _ ? Oh god, that’s disgusting!”

“I don’t know!” Lance raised his hands, stopping Keith’s pointy elbows from digging into his side. “What was I supposed to think with you acting all mother-like with Sophia?”

Another trail of laughter escaped him. If Lance would have looked at his face in the mirror, he would’ve thrown up at the ridiculous fondness he’d see. 

_ Get it together _ , he berated himself. 

“Oh my... _ mother-like… _ ” Keith sighed, calming himself down at last, coughing a little. “You’re so dumb”

“I’m not!” he protested, but it was weak. Having Keith’s attention was… something. It made him feel weak in the knees and faint of heart. How did his laptop survive?

Wait,  _ what? _

“We’ll join you for Christmas,” Keith finally accepted, distracting him from troubling thoughts. “We’ll be right behind you the whole time”

“Great,” perfect. Now Lance could finally buy him what he’d seen at the store the other day, maybe get Sophia something too in the process in hopes of getting her in his corner. A comfortable silence settled between them until suddenly Keith snorted again. 

“What now?” he asked carefully, ready to get insulted again.

“I haven’t laughed so much since the day I died,” Keith confessed.

This time Lance was the one who couldn’t stand it and burst out laughing. 

Sitting there surrounded by cigarette smoke and getting shoved for how inappropriate his laughter was, he felt at home for the first time since he’d moved. 

  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Christmas was one of Lance’s favorite days of the year.

Even if they were an already close family, Christmas seemed to stitch them together even tighter. When asked about why, his mama told him it was all the working around each other to decorate the house. They bustled each day putting up lights and red and green shawls and socks on the wall as well as small Santas to sit on every corner of every table and mistletoe hanging from every single freaking doorway. 

_ Teamwork! _ She’d clap when they finally finished up the tree after Veronica had to sit on his shoulders to put the star up. The satisfaction of seeing the whole picture was unparalleled, almost as fun as opening up the different presents in their yearly rendition of secret Santa, as heartwarming to see just how understanding everyone was of each others wants.

That and the food.

Keith was endlessly amused by all of their antiques. As he’d promised to do, he remained a cold presence at his back all Christmas eve, freaking him out the first time he proved he could disappear but talk at the same time and making everyone laugh at him and his ‘weird tics’. Lance did his best to pass them food at the dinner table, but after a few missed trials and Frog attacking his hand behind the chair, they agreed it was better to wait until everyone was gone.

For the first time since he could remember, Lance was excited for everyone to go to sleep.

As the wine and full stomachs started wearing down their energy at midnight, which was a lot since they’d been celebrating Christmas since lunch, one by one his mama and siblings finally went up the stairs and into their respective rooms after hugging and kissing cheeks and tiredly saying  _ merry Christmas  _ for the umpteenth time. Tired as he was after putting Bella in her cradle, he hurried down the stairs as quietly as he could with all of the excitement firing up his body.

When Lance made it back to the tree, he was stopped still at the doorway by the sight that welcomed him. 

It wasn’t anything out of this world. Well, considering the current circumstance of ghosts inhabiting his house. But it made his heart melt the way it only could on Christmas day when he saw Keith sitting next to the tree with Sophia, lit up only by the soft glow of the tiny golden lights strung up all over the walls. He’d taken down some of the ornaments for the little girl to put up herself, the fondest smile Lance had ever seen on his face. 

“Hey,” Lance felt out of breath when the same blissed-out eyes turned to look at him.

“Hey,” Keith mimicked, following him with his eyes as Lance settled down beside him, shocked to see Sophia didn’t run away at his presence as she did most days. They hadn’t interacted much, only ever watched each other from a distance.  _ She’s shy, _ Keith had explained once before, but now, standing in front of his as she was, she didn’t look shy at all. For the first time, she was a hand’s width away, watching him steadily with surprisingly smart eyes. 

It was hard looking at a two-year-old and knowing she was supposed to be eleven.

“I’ve got something for you,” Lance smiled at her, excited to show her what he’d bought. 

Sophia blinked at him, not unlike Keith’s big eyes often did, but as he reached under for the wrapped present he’d hidden there, he noticed they were different, not only in shape but in color. She looked, as a matter of fact, like Keith’s niece. And Keith looked so beau-

_ No _ .  _ This isn’t about me. _

Lance cleared his throat, trying to ignore the ethereal shine the lights gave to Keith’s hair and face and overall  _ existence _ , and instead handed Sophia the clumsily hand-wrapped present. “Merry Christmas Sophia,” and the happiness on her face finished melting Lance’s heart right to the core.

Watching as she opened the plushie, he didn’t dare look away to meet the gaze fixed on the side of his face, not wanting to stare at Keith’s softness directly just yet and say something… inappropriate, to say the least. It was hard to look away from a little girl that probably hadn’t gotten a gift in nine years anyway, because the smile that scrunched up her whole face as she pressed the stuffed hippo to her chest and rubbed her cheeks all over the soft material made him want to cry.

After taking a few deep, hopefully hidden breaths, he finally turned to look at Keith and froze. The  _ look _ on his face was something Lance was entirely unprepared for. It was something he’d never had the  _ honor _ of seeing before, the kind of face only people who had seen the worst of humanity could make when they were faced with an act of kindness. He looked so grateful, so happy and soft and…

And something Lance couldn’t bear to think about. 

Keith didn’t have to speak, eyes telling him everything Lance needed to know, and he hoped his own eyes said  _ you’re welcome _ too as they turned to watch Sophia. They sat there quietly for a while as Lance brought them food and sweets, watching her play under the Christmas tree until, like clockwork, they both looked up to Bella’s room where she would start crying any minute. 

And that’s the moment Lance had been waiting for.

Leaving Sophia to play with her toy, they climbed up the stairs silently, and in the corridor Lance let Keith think he was going to sleep. But when he gets to his room, instead of going for the bed he reaches under it to take Keith’s present out. When he walked back into Bella’s room, he smiled at the surprise in Keith’s eyes and prided himself at the small drop of his jaw at the box in his hands.

“Is that…” Keith frowned up at him, hand fidgeting on Bella’s back.

“You think I only got something for Sophia?” Lance walked closer, watching as the boy expertly shifted Bella to hold her with only one arm. He helped Keith’s shaky fingers open the bow on top of the box, trying to ignore the electricity between their hands as they bumped each other every step of the way. When the lid was finally off, Keith reached in carefully, picking up the first shirt folded neatly in the stack with a NASA logo stamped on the front.

“What’s this?” Keith whispered, not wanting to wake up Bella. 

“I don’t know how…”  _ ghost logic works. _ “How you work. But I thought it must get tiring to wear the same clothes every day. And I didn’t know your size, so uh... I couldn’t buy you pants or shoes. But I found these the other day and I thought… uh… I remembered you talked about space, and I got some from the movies you said you liked and...yeah”

Keith was looking at him with _that_ _look_ again. 

Lance felt out of breath. 

“Merry Christmas, Keith,” he whispered.

“Merry Christmas, Lance,” Keith whispered back.

Lance watched as Keith took out the rest of the shirts one by one, both of them silent as he looked and traced the different logos.

And if some of the shirts in there were Lance’s… well. 

Keith didn’t have to know.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lots of smiling...
> 
> Keith tells us a little about his story next one so get the tissues ready!


	5. January

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bad parenting warning... read the tags.

Keith starts talking more after Christmas and Lance learns a lot about the Kensleys. It’s what his two-months-before self would’ve loved and now most of everything made sense: why they did it, how they did it and how they hid it too. Like Shiro said, all he has to do is listen and Keith spells it out easily. The only thing he doesn’t understand by the end of January is why Keith keeps saying the twins hate him every time they’re brought up in conversation.

One day Lance can’t stand the curiosity any longer and gives in.

It’s as they’re watching Sleeping Beauty when it happens, and it catches him by surprise when he blurts it out and Keith doesn’t hesitate to answer, not even caught off guard by the frankly out-of-nowhere question. “It makes sense,” he answers simply, “the guilt hasn’t rubbed off either”. 

After two months of slowly attaining information, pulling at threads of the story like cat’s tails hoping he wouldn’t get bit, the statement made sense. And for Lance to say something made sense after prying at Keith’s sealed off lips with a metaphorical crowbar was amazing, and it was only when Lance had managed to procure the closest image to the truth after slowly piecing together the puzzle-pieces that Keith would hand him shyly.

It was worth writing down. He could almost imagine reading it off the pages of a worn-out book.

Marissa Kensley, kind as she’d been through her childhood and teenage years, was born sterile. It was a curse she and her husband discovered the first year they attempted to have kids, and it was especially unfair to them considering the overwhelming, desperate craving for children they’d always had. The Kensley’s didn’t give up easily, but after a couple of years of failed treatments and missed trials, their frustration only grew along with their resentment. It dug a deep void, deep in the hearts that had once been so happy with their little family.

Refusing to be defeated by circumstance, they decided to adopt. Wrongfully ashamed because of their inabilities, it was an affair they chose to hide. They brought Nicholas and Abigail Kensley home as they once would have sneaked in their lover through a crooked window. Marissa was a quiet lady and mostly kept to herself, which made it easy to hide the fact she’d never been pregnant. 

They were happy. 

For a while, at least.

The bliss ran out as the years trickled by, slowly slowly, like sand spilling out a tiny hole in an hourglass. The glass broke when time became too much, when their kids grew too dissimilar from their parents until one day their presence didn’t make the cut to fill the void inside anymore. Looking at their one boy and girl, the Kensley’s saw strangers where their family was supposed to sit, invaders in their carefully crafted home. 

They decided to adopt again, adults transformed into little kids looking for their golden ticket. 

There was no shiny paper waiting in the orphanage the second time they came around, but they did find a ten-year-old boy who looked just like them, perfectly familiar, and decided he’d do. They took him home to become a family of five, kept him home so no one would notice. And they were happy again, riding that high for all it could give, as close to the feeling as they could get. 

For a while, at least.

Five years later, Keith was a teenager, living as normal a life he could for a homeschooled kid who didn’t see the sun much, smoking outside a gas station with his best friend. They’d been talking and pacing around trying to get rid of the cold when a girl stumbled up the street. Shiro’s sentence was cut short by the sight, and when his friend turned to watch why, it was too see Vivian. 

_ It’s been ten years and I still remember her so clearly _ , Keith had said through a cloud of smoke one night as they sat by the gazebo.  _ Her face was dark at first, dirty too, but as she walked closer it was… it was like looking in a mirror.  _

Faced with what he didn’t recognize then as the Kensley’s second golden ticket, Keith decided to take her home. Feeling lucky as the stars, the couple took her in gratefully. She was a good girl, kind and smiling and beautiful, bringing only joy to their growing family. 

That wouldn’t last long.

Three months passed before Vivian finally told the truth about why she’d been wandering the streets alone. She’d hitchhiked across many states, somehow unscathed after being kicked out by her parents because she was-

_ Pregnant _ , Keith smiled, nostalgic, a hand over his stomach as if he was remembering the feeling of hers. Mirror neurons, probably. _ I became so attached to her. We all did. She was so happy that we understood, it made us all grow closer, like a real family. I… I felt responsible for her. And she felt safe with me. We became close.  _

Sophia was born a healthy child in February. 

Vivian killed herself a week later.

_ I think that’s why they did it in February, _ Keith shrugged.  _ They were so happy about the baby when she was born, it was like they could pretend it was theirs instead of Vivian’s. But after she died they were depressed, so depressed even Sophia could feel it. And she’d cry so much, missing her mo- _

_Missing her_. Keith swallowed hard, not being able to say it. _They_ _lasted a year before adopting the twins in a… vague attempt to fill the void she left behind. But they forgot about the void under, the one that had been there from the very start. And eventually it all… it just fell apart. _

And smirking:  _ poor foundations.  _

There were too many children and not enough money to keep them, not enough love to go around for all of them. Stephen Kensley lost his job and everything else went down with it like a row of explosive dominoes. When February came around again, the memory of their failures shone too bright, the loss of their daughter a reopened wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding. 

One night it became unbearable, so unbearable the Kensley’s decided to wait for their children to fall asleep and stick a knife in their stomachs. 

Keith hadn’t been in his room.

_ They wanted to take Sophia,  _ Keith whispered one night as they took care of Bella.  _ But I was with her, holding her just like this, and when I saw the knife and the blood… I couldn’t let her go. Mom- Marissa tried to explain. She told me everything I’ve been telling you, trying to make sense of it, to make me understand… so she wouldn’t feel as guilty maybe, I don’t know. But I just… I couldn’t let her go and they-  _

Lance had put a hand on his shoulder, trying to pull him back to the moment, and Keith had relaxed visibly and pulled the baby closer to him.  _ She stabbed her first. And as she cried and I tried to stop the bleeding, she stabbed me too.  _

The story about Keith’s death was horrible, but Keith wasn’t as uncomfortable with it as he was about what happened after.  _ Guilty _ , Keith said. 

And now Lance had the confidence to ask: “Why?”

“What I’ve gathered from being dead for nine years is that the reason only the young Kensley’s are still kicking around is that they’re, well, young,” Keith started. 

As if death was kind enough to give them the energy they needed to still enjoy what little they could of the world.

“They’re right to hate me,” Keith admitted. “The first years the situation was… different, to say the least. Nick and Abigail, the twins and Sophia, they all followed through their normal routines”

Lance could picture them wandering the halls, laying in their beds until they were taken away, sitting at the table even though there was no food. It must have been awful aimlessly looking for some sense of normalcy, mourning their life and the lives of their family, the image of what was supposed to be their parents tainted by their last mistake.

“Nicholas and Abigail took care of them at the start,” Keith continued, fingers rubbing against each other. A nervous tick. “Well, tried to. They mostly kept the twins in check and played with Sophia, but after the first three years they lost the energy to appear anymore”

”Didn’t you help them?” Lance prompted, already dreading the answer, but Keith had to be able to talk about this with someone, and Shiro wasn’t there so…

“The first thing I did after I died was look for Vivian. I’d missed her so much… And when I realized I could see her again, a small part of me was stupidly grateful for everything that had happened. But she had been dead for two years and I… I didn’t know what that could do to someone. When I found her it wasn’t her anymore. So I refused to be me. I was depressed, I think… I didn’t appear just… lay under what used to be my bed until I almost lost my mind”

“What changed?” Lance asked.

Keith smiled. He hadn’t smiled since he’d began talking. “Sophia,” he whispered. “One day she just… crawled under the bed with me, poked at where my head was supposed to be until I appeared. When she saw me she smiled… and all I could think of was how unfair it was that she was there with me. So I decided to look after her” 

Keith laughed then, self-deprecating. “Well, that’s what I tell myself. Sometimes I think it’s just because of how similar she was to her mother, a carbon-copy almost. I think Sophia looked for me because… because I looked just like her too”

She did. And looking at them together made Lance... feel things.

At first, he didn’t mind it. He’d always been prone to stupid crushes so he was used to pining helplessly. Keith was beautiful, dead or not, unattainable and impossible as all things Lance adored were. They’d been hanging out for what felt like years, cohabiting silent rooms and brushing thighs in mid-winter. Keith’s presence had become as familiar as the clothes hanging on his skin, as familiar as the feeling of the pillowcase under his head and the creaking of his door. 

Lance didn’t shy away from crushes. He was a naturally affectionate person, and he’d fought hard for that inch closer to Keith, for a hold on his shoulder and, when he was holding Bella, for brushing fingers when their hands met on her back. He’d resigned himself to rejection and to be resented for his superficial affections, so he just decided to enjoy whatever he could get.

And yet, life wasn’t done playing its sneaky games.

Keith started to act weird. Weirder than usual. 

Towards Lance, specifically.

He had evidence, too. 

For starters, Keith had been wearing the shirts Lance gave him. That wasn’t weird in and of itself, but Lance had noticed the boy seemed to especially like the ones that had been his before, suspiciously so. He seemed to take a special liking to the Pepsi-Cola shirt and...

And Lance liked it a lot, ridiculously a lot. 

Keith wasn’t that much shorter than him, but that extra hanging strip of cloth made him look so soft in the moonlight streaming in from the windows and the wasted yellow of the lamps. 

And as if that wasn’t enough, Keith started to smile more, even  _ blush _ more, for Christ’s sake. 

Before, the only time the boy would look anything other than annoyed was when Shiro came over. Now he was more relaxed, his body not as tense sitting beside Lance, which was normal after spending so much time together. What  _ wasn’t _ normal was that now and then Lance would turn and catch him looking away quickly, the faintest shade of red painting his neck. When Lance teased him about it, Keith would tease him right back, but he’d be blushing like they were standing in the cold instead of hanging out with blankets over their heads.

Maybe Lance was crazy. Maybe he was just projecting his own fondness.

Whatever  _ it _ was,  _ it _ was becoming a problem. 

When he was once excited to return from school, now he was desperate, foot tapping insistently below his desk and a destroyed pencil tip in his mouth. Pidge would kick at his chair for staring at the clock like it would explode if he dared take his eyes off it for even a second. 

Even his family took notice of it. 

Veronica constantly laughed at his silence on the table, at his annoyance when he wasn’t excused. He was one missed chew away from choking on his food at his hastiness to get up from the chair, face red when his mama questioned what he was looking for when he turned his head to check if Keith was waiting at the stairs. 

Lance couldn’t even sleep in peace, tossing and turning to stare at his clock, not able to resist throwing the sheets off and walking quietly down the hall to keep Keith company.

That was the bright side of things.

There was also something seriously wrong with Keith. 

Lately he’d started having these...episodes. Lance wouldn't have noticed if they happened during their binges, but sometimes during conversation he’d just stop, trailing off in the middle of the sentence like he’d forgotten what to say next. Or like the words had been plucked right from his lips.

The first time it happened, Lance laughed, thinking nothing of it for a second. When Keith didn’t join in, he thought it was maybe a joke, but after his laughter died down and he still hadn’t moved, Lance started to get worried. 

Leaning over, he swallowed nervously. Keith’s eyes were half-lidded and empty, staring at something to the right of the door. Lance had shaken him a little and waved a hand in front of his face to no results. He only reacted when Lance called his name in a raised voice, and it was only to turn his head slowly in his direction, blinking slowly and off-center. 

_ Keith? _ Lance whispered, daring to pat his cheek a little. But the boy didn’t react at all. 

Not knowing how long it would be before he reacted again, Lance pulled the boy up along with him to help him lie down on the bed. Keith’s mind was unconscious and his body pliant, but when Lance tried to help him sit the boy shook his hands off, knelt on the floor and crawled under the bed with practiced ease. 

Lance didn’t know what to do or how long it would take, so he lied down on the floor beside the bed and waited for him to wake up. 

When Keith finally woke up he was calm. Too calm.  _ I’m sorry _ , he’d whispered, tired. _ I don’t… I don’t know what…  _ but he knew well enough.

_ It’s okay, _ he’d said even though he wanted to ask, but Keith’s eyes were enough to warn him off the topic.

That’s why, when it happened again after he finished explaining, Lance just sighed, took him to the bed and lay down next to him on the floor.

This time it was different.

After a few minutes of looking at Keith, of feeling his empty gaze fixed somewhere on his cheek, something happened that Lance wasn’t prepared for. It started with the smallest of sounds, a small intake of breath that made him think maybe Keith was waking up.  _ That’s weird,  _ Lance thought, _ normally he’ll take more than an hour. Normally he’ll just blink and- _

Then he saw it.

Small and wet, slowly streaming down Keith’s cheeks were tears, wetting his eyelashes and turning them darker. It was unnerving but… strangely fascinating watching his still empty gaze pooling with them. Normally, watching someone cry made Lance so sad he was left running around making bad jokes trying to cheer them up. But watching Keith cry, wide-eyed and unshifting gaze fixed on Lance’s face, he didn’t know what to do.

Feeling useless, he ditched his place next to the bed and crawled under, shifting as close as Keith as he dared and hoping maybe the warmth of their proximity would help. Lance had tried waking him up several times before, but it was impossible, almost as hard as just laying there and watching. 

But that's all Lance was left to do.

Keith’s tears only stopped an hour later when he woke up from his daze.

It was graceful, a force of habit Lance would guess, the way he slowly raised a hand to wipe at his cheeks, eyes finally rising that final inch to meet Lance’s gaze. 

“You were crying,” he said carefully, immediately feeling stupid at how obvious it was. 

Keith hummed in agreement, dark eyes flicking, searching for something in his face. 

“They’re getting worse,” Lance dared to admit.

Keith smiled, and Lance could already tell his words were being ignored. When he spoke again, he sounded so tired. It was worrying. “What are you doing, Lance?” 

“What?” he teased, trying to keep Keith’s smile right where it was. “You don't suppose to tell me I’m meant to sleep  _ on _ the bed, now do you? Why would I sleep on that godforsaken marshmallow when I can be right here on the cold hard floor with you? There’s-”

“That’s not what I meant,” Keith’s stare didn’t budge. 

Lance swallowed nervously. “What did you mean, then?”

“I  _ mean _ ,” Keith breathed in, bracing himself. “Why do you stay holed up here with me all day? Why do you buy cigarettes when your mother reprimands you like she does? Why do you glare at Shiro every time he hugs me goodbye? Why did-“ Keith’s eyes flicked down, looking at his Pepsi Cola shirt for a moment. Lance had bought it together with a Coca Cola shirt, hoping someday he’d find the right person to give it to. 

Apparently, Keith had noticed.

“You didn’t even take out the tags off the new ones to hide it. You think I can’t tell?” Lance had to laugh a little then. The sneaky asshole had known from the very start and had decided to play around. His laughter wilted at Keith’s firm stare. “I want to know why Lance”

Lance could play around too. 

“Why do you wear them?” he asked instead of answering.

Keith smirked. “Why do you think?” the way he said it, even with his icy-breath, just made Lance want to kiss him. And his eyes were so shiny from the tears...

When had they gotten so close?

“Same reason I gave them to you,” Lance whispered back, not able to tear his gaze away from pink lips.

“Why’s that?” Keith was looking down too, face getting closer and closer until they were less than a hair's breadth away. 

Lance kissed him. 

It started chaste and gradually escalated, getting desperate with every second that passed. 

And right then, Lance was just a normal teenager, lying under a bed and pulling his crush closer, trying to make him forget how sad he’d been only moments ago. And Keith was just a boy, tired and done with the cards the world had dealt him, pulling him closer by the shirt and snorting at the matching Coca Cola logo crushed in his hand. 

And they were just kids, each kissing back like they could find the answers they needed if they only pushed hard enough. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happiness begets angst


	6. February

They don’t talk about it the next day.

Lance could understand that, really he did. Dealing with people could be hard, a lifetime of listening to Luis had taught him that, if nothing else. Some people just weren’t wired like he was, preferring to keep to themselves instead of shouting every truth they could think of to the four winds, writing every thought that crossed their minds down on the metaphorical whiteboard with permanent ink. Some people didn’t want to use every color that came in the crayon box, choosing their favorite and using it up to the last inch. 

That was okay. Lance knew that.

However, that didn’t mean Keith wasn’t driving him absolutely crazy by refusing to acknowledge what had happened.

All his life, he’d deemed himself a lover: someone who fell in love with different people every day. Even if he didn’t always act on his feelings, flirting was his  _ thing _ , a thing he abused so much some would call it his natural speech pattern. Lance knew he could be annoying at his best and irritating at his worst, but it always came from a good place. He just enjoyed beauty, was enthusiastic and, at his core, simply loved love and all that it came with. 

Every party there’d be some girl in his class to make out with behind the stairs, that friend of a friend from the football team that shoved him into a dark room, calling out a small  _ see you around _ on the way out only to never meet his eye again. Even if it was a little harsh, Lance didn’t think he’d be able to recognize them if they crossed paths on the street, nevermind the fact that they didn’t even live on the same state anymore. Veronica liked calling him a  _ puta _ for it, but he didn’t mind. 

Beauty, as it were, came in every shape and pattern, and Lance had never been able to sit still about it. He just couldn’t bring himself to settle on a specific type, each day batting eyelashes at a different hair and eye color like a girl would pick clothes when she woke up. He  _ liked _ having short-lived crushes, it gave him something to fixate his energy on.

That’s how it had always been.

Now, there was a PROBLEM.

Even if Keith had been a stranger before he wasn’t one now, and it wasn’t like Lance could get away from him and ignore whatever had happened. Every day he came back home and the boy would be right there waiting for him, had been for so long his presence had become a set thing in his life, the prettiest stain on the carpet. Keith was like a ring he couldn’t remember putting on his finger, a perfect fit that didn’t feel quite right when he dared take it out to wash his hands.

So Lance began to execute plan A. Plan A had worked wonders before when he’d gotten hooked on a girl or boy that wouldn’t look twice at him. It was simple: choose a new object for his affections. 

At school, he flirted with girls on his Spanish class that thought he was funny, spat out every cheesy pick-up line he could think and watch them blush, hit his shoulder and call him a sap. They were sweet, but their pretty manicured fingers didn’t push hard enough and all he could think of was how Keith would shove him after a bad joke or how cold his hands were when they brushed his arm. 

_ Maybe I need to look at other boys, _ Lance thought,  _ some bad boy in a leather jacket, that will do the trick. _

So like the worst student, he snuck outside to lean against the brick walls and flirt a little with what he once would’ve called a perfect dream: some guy with a scar on his face with a story that would definitely make him cry. And he did, but when the stranger laughed Lance missed a certain someone’s stuttered huffs, and the smoke that the guy blew out looked way better falling off of Keith’s pretty lips. 

In conclusion: plan A was a complete bust. 

Following the natural course of action, Lance decided to execute plan B which consisted of attacking the problem first-hand: pursue Keith until he either got rejected outright or admitted that he reciprocated his feelings and…

And something.

It was a bad idea from the start because it implied Keith might a) get sick of his advances and get mad at him, b) potentially end the easy-going friendship they’d developed until that point as Keith might get uncomfortable with him, or c) actually  _ like him back _ . 

Option C didn’t sound like an issue until Lance projected himself to the future and started trying to work out the logistics of dating a fucking  _ ghost _ . And that wasn’t even considering that Keith’s episodes were getting worse with every passing day, the edges of his presence getting blurrier in the day-light.

But he decided not to think about that until it was absolutely necessary. 

Lance was still contemplating how to run with plan B three days after the kiss as he accompanied Keith to smoke a little, which was when the boy suddenly mentioned Sophia would’ve turned six that day.

“It’s her  _ birthday _ ?” Lance said incredulously, checking his clock to see it was- “Like,  _ today _ ?” 

“Don’t tell her,” Keith said seriously. 

“That’s a cool birthday,” Lance couldn’t help but say out loud. “I won’t if you say so... but can you tell me why?”

“Sophia… I don’t really know if she understands that she’s dead,” Keith started. “I mean, she gets that she doesn’t grow old like she should and that sometimes people can’t see her, but she doesn’t really talk about it. She remembers what a birthday is supposed to be like, though. You know, cake and candles, presents...” Keith explained. “And even though she says she doesn’t mind that I can’t give her that, I can tell she still gets upset. It’s hard telling a two-year-old looking kid that she’s supposed to be eleven, you know? Birthdays are just… something we silently decided we could do without”

Of course they wouldn’t like being reminded of how long they’d been dead for and how old they would’ve been if they hadn’t died. 

But Lance just wouldn’t be deterred so easily. 

“Does she remember what date it lands on?”

“Not really?” Keith shrugged. “I mean, the last time we celebrated was like five years ago and-”

Standing up quickly, he held out a hand to Keith, smiling at his startled face at the sudden movement.

“What are you doing?” the boy frowned.

“Do you trust me?” Lance asked.

That’s how they ended up in the kitchen. His mama was taking patients, so she would be out of commission for a while, leaving them to worry only about the task at hand. Keith leaned against the counter, complaining about how  _ long _ Lance was taking and how  _ annoyed _ he was because he wasn’t  _ explaining _ what they were doing there and- 

Then he realized what his plan was and immediately started protesting against it. 

Lance ignored the calls of his name, replying to every claim in Spanish and enjoying how Keith’s eyebrow started to twitch. When he realized Lance wasn’t even  _ attempting _ to listen, he progressed to trying to put the ingredients back in the cupboard and then taking them from his hands. After a few minutes of dragging him through the kitchen floor, Keith’s pose finally broke and laughter started to seep through his anger.

“Oh my god, you asshole,” he pulled at the spatula in Lance’s hand weakly. “I already told you-” but stopped himself as Sophia wandered into the kitchen, immediately clutching onto his leg as she always did and looking up at him curiously. 

“Hey Sophia,” Lance called excitedly, ripping the spatula from their tug of war and offering it to her. “Do you know what day it is?” the girl shook her head, eyes switching to look at Keith and back at him again. “It’s Valentine's day!” he turned to look at Keith’s face then, continuing without looking away. “That means we get to show the people we love how much they mean to us…” he looked back down at Sophia. “With cake!”

“Cake?” the little girl jumped up and down, pulling at Keith’s pant leg to be carried. 

Keith gave in quickly after that, not able to resist her happiness and pulling her up to sit her on the counter beside them. With a reprimanding gaze, he turned to look at Lance and his ‘subtle’ winking, sighing for a second before agreeing. Lance finished taking out the ingredients along with their mama’s cooking book as Sophia squealed in excitement, and every time he turned his head, he could see the smile slipping next to the stubborn tilt of Keith’s frown.

With the help of Sophia’s tiny and uncoordinated hands and not without getting sugar glaze all over themselves, they finished up mixing the ingredients together and even making icing and let Sophia run off to play in Bella’s room as they waited for it to bake. Keith stubbornly sat on the counter as  _ he never asked to bake so he should clean it up  _ as Lance cleared the floor and countertop of flour around him, talking about nothing and everything as they waited for the timer to go off.

Lance was ranting about Marvel’s shitty title-cards when Keith went quiet all of a sudden. Abandoning his broom, he worried for a second it was another episode, moving to stand in front of Keith before the boy suddenly spoke again. 

“I just… ” he was looking at the floor between their feet. “Thank you for this,” he admitted in a quiet voice. If it hadn’t been Keith, Lance would’ve said he looked almost bashful.

It was with that observation that he noticed there was still some blue icing on the left corner of Keith’s mouth, probably from when they’d been taste-testing before. Just a tiny streak of blue, shiny as a new penny in the middle of the street. 

Lucky. 

Unlike his sister, Lance believed in beautiful coincidences. And if that small mistake at the edge of Keith’s lips wasn’t a sign from the universe begging Lance to make a move, making space for a perfect moment for him to man-up and just  _ go _ for it, then he didn’t know what could be.

“Hey, Keith?”

Lance licked his own lips, feeling the nerves tug at his hand as it settled next to Keith’s leg on the counter as the boy looked up, so accustomed to their proximity that he didn’t even flinch at how close they were standing.

“You’ve got some icing on your face”

“Where?” Keith asked and laughed, one of his hands rising up to wipe at his cheek and then his forehead as he looked for the offensive mark. “Come on, where-”

But before those fingers could find their target and wipe his chance away, Lance leaned in to plant a chaste kiss on his lips, tasting the sugar of the icing and freezing the boy’s search in the process. After a few seconds, he began to lean back, thinking he’d screwed up for good this time at the boy’s lack of response. But then he felt Keith’s hands rising up to hold onto his shoulders, pulling him closer as his lips finally started kissing back.

Lance couldn’t believe that ridiculous line had worked.

Keith tried to pull away to say something but Lance wouldn’t let him. It worked,  _ goddammit _ , and he wasn’t letting Keith slither away and start ignoring whatever the hell  _ this _ was again. It was a repeat of their little back and forth with the spatula, only this time little huffs of that cute laugh started escaping between them and Lance had to give in.

“That’s the corniest shit I’ve ever heard,” he managed to say between the second-gaps Lance allowed.

“I have a better one,” Lance whispered between them, the silly and ridiculous part of his brain spelling DING DING DING at the opportunity for a shitty pick-up line. “I think you sat on the sugar too because your ass-”

“Keith?” Sophia’s voice called, prematurely interrupting Lance’s attempts at romance. 

Keith froze for exactly a second before his hands splayed out on his shoulders and violently pushed him away. Unfortunately, the shove was so hard and uneven that Lance ended up slipping and crashing forehead-first against the corner of the cabinet that had been behind him. 

Of course.

“Oh shi-” he cursed at the stab of pain before remembering there was a two-year-old present. “I mean crap.  _ Crap _ , that hurts”

And the moment was utterly and completely ruined.

Lance thought maybe after cleaning up the blood from his face and pulling the cake from the oven, they could shoo Sophia back to playing and maybe go back to their making out like the true teenagers they were. But, as Lance predicted, once again Keith had gone back to pretending nothing had happened. The only thing that would’ve made it more obvious he was ignoring it was if he’d turned his nose up and whistled like a caricature every time Lance looked at him.

As midnight came around and they were finally alone in Bella’s room waiting for her to wake up, the boy turned to look at him. Lance thought naively for a second they could go back to it. 

And then Lance saw the look on his face. 

Keith looked absolutely run-down. Where before his eyes had been filled with mirth now they looked empty. His skin had lost all of its glow, now closer to translucent, and Lance knew that if he would’ve touched him in that moment, he would’ve definitely been colder. Under the night sky, everything about him was different than what it’d looked like under the muted rays of sun. 

In short, Keith looked like he was a second away from falling to the floor in a heap of bones.

“Thank you for today, Lance,” he whispered, looking somewhere to the right of his face like he’d do when he was having one of his episodes. It was as unnerving as it was worrying. “But I can take care of Bella. You should go sleep”

“But you-”

“Can you just go?” he sounded angry, but his eyes looked afraid when he looked up to glare, completely disturbed for something Lance couldn’t understand. He must’ve made a face, because Keith turned completely away from him then. “Just leave me alone” 

Lance was all for respecting boundaries and stopping when someone told him to stop, knowing of course that no meant fucking no, plain and simple. But even as he walked away, a million questions filled his head. Even if he was angry, Keith wasn’t saying no and he wasn’t saying stop, was responding to his advances just fine and then ignoring them for some reason. 

Laying in his bed after leaving him like that, Lance started to see that something wasn’t right, something that went beyond his own feelings and beyond whatever Keith felt. 

Lance was going to find out.

* * *

  
  


Another week passed with no sign of a follow-up when Lance finally decided he’d had enough.

The irritation he felt probably stemmed from the fact he hadn’t been able to be with Keith as much as he’d liked after Valentine's day. For days now, he’d been stuck in the library staring at what felt like infinite journals and textbooks and math problems, studying for exams with Hunk and Pidge like the good student he hadn’t been for months reviewing what he hadn’t learned in the semester.

So basically everything.

It was hell.

That’s probably why he didn’t notice the date glaring at him in red from their tiny countdown calendar, the giant TWENTY-SECOND OF FEBRUARY hanging on the fridge not really processing even when night fell over as he finally arrived home after hours of rotting away at school.

Lance was absolutely exhausted, numbers swirling around his head insistently even after he’d unironically banged his head against the table a couple of times in an attempt to feel a little clearer. Wanting to feel like himself for the first time in a while, he stared at the ceiling contemplating his current situation.

_ I’m a normal seventeen-year-old teenager struggling through my penultimate year of school. Every day I get home and talk to the ghost of another seventeen-year-old teenager that has been dead for over nine years and is anything but normal. For some reason, Keith is avoiding me even though he reciprocates my feelings. It’s been a week since the last time we kissed and all I can think about every time I see his stupid pretty face is dipping him like a blushing damsel and kiss whatever life he has left out of him.  _

_ Also, I think I’ve gone insane because I’m saying things like ‘penultimate’ and ‘reciprocate’.  _

It was enough dealing with logistics problems and Pythagorean fucking theorem and the goddamn second world war and the origins of terrorism. Was it so wrong Lance wanted to come home after a long day and just forget about everything and make-out with his ghost not-boyfriend?

An hour passed before he decided the frustration in his head weighed more than the tiredness of his bones, so he gathered all the force of will left in the far corners of his body and pushed himself out of bed, marching down the corridor towards Bella’s room like a man on a mission.

When he opened the door, Keith was facing the window like he’d been the very first night Lance saw him, body swaying slowly as he rocked Bella in his arms. The boy turned around immediately at the sound of the door and Lance had to stop himself from visibly flinching at the sight. 

The last time he’d seen Keith, he’d looked like he was in perfect health compared to how he stood before him now. The image that greeted him now looked like it had been drained, its opacity reduced to fifty-percent of what it was before. 

Keith looked, for once, like what Lance always believed ghosts were supposed to look like.

Every line of dialogue he’d written lying in his bed of a fight for answers instantly vaporized from his mind, as quickly as worry replaced every strand of anger running through his veins.

“Keith,” Lance begged quietly, walking closer to the after image of the boy he’d met on October. He didn’t insult the boy by explaining what he meant, they both knew this conversation had been due for a long time now. “Talk to me”

“It’s been nine years,” Keith whispered, not looking at him. “I should be twenty-six. I should’ve finished college already and doing… stupid shit every weekend, moving into a small apartment with someone… arguing about, I don’t know, where to put the couch or what color to paint the walls and…”

“You shouldn’t think like that,” Lance tried to say, but Keith just kept going.

“I always wanted to get married. I wanted to be a dancer or go to space, maybe… maybe have kids,” he shook his head. “It’s been so long and I’m so tired… of hoping. Of day-dreaming and… I hate it. I  _ hate _ this,” he looked up at Lance then, and he could see his hands slipping through Bella’s skin, making her squirm. “I’m so tired, Lance,” his voice was getting smaller and he was shaking so bad, it was breaking his heart to just stand there and watch him fall apart.

Lance approached him like one would a wild animal, hands outstretched and slow, not knowing what to expect but wanting to help nonetheless. Like a doll, he maneuvered one of Keith’s hands to his shoulder, starting to take Bella when he started muttering again. 

“I’ve had such a nice time,” he continued, watching him take Bella with eyes that were empty and filled with emotion somehow. “Isabella is such a good kid… Sophia’s been so happy. It’s… hard to make her smile sometimes. And you always… always make me… ” 

The hand that was left on his shoulder tightened as Lance carefully put the baby in her cradle, but the grip was weak, and as he turned to watch the boy again, he could feel the fingers slipping into his skin, cold spreading where they fused.

“They’re happy because of  _ you _ ,” Lance tried to reassure him, but that just made tears start falling down his cheeks, cutting across his pale skin and leaving shiny tracks. 

“It’s not fair,” Keith started shaking his head, slow at first but gaining speed quickly, hair flapping around his face wildly. “It’s not fair it’s not fair it’s not  _ fair _ -” 

“Stop,” he tried, but the boy just kept shaking and shaking and shaking and Lance didn’t understand how he could move his head so fast without throwing up. “Keith, please. Stop. You’re hurting yourself,” he said it so many times, but Keith wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t stop until Lance gently but firmly held his face still, thumbs wiping away the tears and shushing when the muscles beneath his hands tensed trying to turn. 

Lance was reminded of his mama holding Luis through one of his meltdowns.  _ He’s not a dog, _ he remembered complaining as she waved a hand at his six-year-old self to be quiet.  _ You shouldn’t shush him like a dog. _

He understood now. 

“I’m tired,” Keith whispered again. “I’m tired of feeling like I’m not… like I’m not  _ here _ ”

“You’re right here with me,” and as cliche as it was, it made Keith smile. 

“Can you kiss me?” 

Lance wasn’t expecting it. And as much as he wanted to, as much as it was what he’d been waiting for… “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Lance could hear the selfish part of his brain protesting, but it was the right thing to do. He couldn’t take advantage of Keith when he was like this, he couldn’t-

“Please,” Keith's hands tightened. “It’s the only thing that makes it go away, the only… the only thing that makes me feel real ”

How could he say no to that?

Using the grip on his face, Lance kissed him. It wasn’t like the last times, not passionate or quick or desperate. Lance kissed him like he’d hold fragile china, careful careful, hoping it wouldn’t break in his hands. And Keith kissed back, hands melding into Lance’s own hands on his face. 

They separated but stood close, huddled together in the still-cold air, reveling in the warmth their proximity gave.

Standing there, the future didn’t exist. Lance couldn’t bring himself to care.

When the boy’s breathing finally evened out and he stopped shaking, when he finally calmed down, Lance smiled.

Keith didn’t smile back.

“You’re the best thing that could’ve happened to me,” Keith kissed his cheek, and Lance had the awful feeling he was saying something else he couldn’t quite hear, that there were small words between the sounds he made, spelling something out he couldn’t understand.

“Please tell me what’s wrong,” Lance begged for what he didn’t then know would be the last time.

Keith finally smiled. “I love you,” he whispered, and Lance blinked.

It was dark for a second, for just a millisecond, just as there had been a million dark milliseconds during his day. For a millisecond, the darkness consumed him, the kind only blinking at night could bring, the one that made one desperate to see what was on the other side, reaching into the void and hoping something would reach back. He blinked, and in that millisecond realized what Keith meant with those words. 

Lance reached for him in that darkness, desperate to say it too, to say it back.

When his eyes opened once more, as they’d done a million times before, Keith was already gone, leaving him colder than he’d ever felt next to the ghost, colder than he’d feel buried in ice, knowing he couldn’t say it back.

Keith was gone. And Lance didn’t even say goodbye.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry?


	7. Summer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short chapter...

Lance woke up as he would any morning to the sound of the alarm clock buzzing away next to his head, proudly proclaiming it was NINE AM and it wasn’t okay for him to keep lazing around on his bed. Blinking and rubbing at his eyes, he yawned, transforming the reach for his phone into a stretch that elongated throughout his whole body. 

The tiny numbers below the clock took a second to register in his head.  _ Oh, right _ . As his finger automatically tapped the password to open up the phone and promptly turned the alarm back on, Lance smiled at the messages that started popping up.

_ Lance! Happy birthday man! I’ll give you your present later... _

_ Hb asshole…  _

_ Sobrino! Espero tengas el más feliz de los días… _

_ Happy birthday man, hope you’re settling down over there. How’s your life been? _

It was the twenty-eighth of July. Almost September.

Lance turned eighteen today. As it in the middle of summer, he’d always loved his birthday, loved that he could wake up and do whatever he wanted, even if it wasn’t much he wanted to do anyway. Normally, his family would wake up a little earlier than him and wait for him downstairs with presents and they’d spend the afternoon together doing whatever he wanted, which normally involved them all cooking his favorite meal together and then getting sick to the stomach for eating too much cake. Then, when night fell, Lance would go out with his friends and maybe eat some more, hang around for a while and then go back to sleep. 

But today, he could already tell it was going to be different because all he could think about was the last birthday he’d celebrated. 

_ Cake and candles, presents… Birthdays are just something we decided we could do without.  _ Lance could picture him so clearly in his mind, could imagine the warmth of his voice on his skin that day, the taste of the sugar on his lips as he laughed.  _ That’s the corniest shit I’ve ever heard.  _ Lance hadn’t seen him since February. 

Keith had been gone for five months. 

The first few weeks were the hardest because Lance was determined to see him again. 

The first night, Lance had gone to Bella’s room and sat by the window. When two in the morning came by and his baby sister woke up, he was ashamed to admit he didn’t make a single move to comfort her. The first few seconds she only called for them, a mix of babbles resembling Keith and Lance’s name respectively. But when no one came he let her cry and cry and cry, but Keith didn’t come. 

After a while, Lance started crying too. 

There was a crash after a while, and as he rushed to his room Lance smiled, thinking it had worked, but when he got there, it was only to find his lamp had been shattered beside his bed and everything on his desk swept to the floor. 

Lance remembered Keith telling him about the crying, how anxious it made him. And still he’d let Sophia cry and cry in an attempt to lure him back.

It was the cruelest thing Lance had ever done.

It was hard, but he didn’t go back to Bella’s room after that. Every night after, he lay awake in his own bed like he’d done the first nights he’d moved in, straining to hear any sound misplaced in the house, trying to catch the footsteps of Keith pacing in his sister's room. Bella didn’t cry so he knew the boy was there, but the one time he’d let himself run after the sound, Keith would already be gone when he’d get there. 

Some nights, he’d hold his baby sister and feel guilty. Guilty because he only did it when he missed Keith the most.

It was the same with Sophia. 

Even if Keith refused to see him, the little girl had no reservations towards him, and she’d still come visit him from time to time. Lance would always smile and welcome her in, playing her favorite movies on his laptop and reading aloud every children's book he could download. 

It was unnerving how much she looked like him, but Lance was never one to take out his resentment on people who didn’t deserve it, especially if they had nothing to do with it. All he ever allowed himself to do was ask where Keith was, but he stopped asking when the answers became repetitive or terrifying.

_ Where’s Keith? _

Sometimes she’d shake her head and tell him Keith told her not to tell him. Sometimes she’d say nothing at all and just frown. And sometimes…

_ Sleeping.  _ Sophia shrugged when Lance asked what she meant.  _ Like mommy.  _

_ Can’t you wake him up? _ He asked carefully. 

Sophia would just shrug again.  _ Could you wake him up? _

It was hard to think of him being like that, how Keith had described the first three years after he’d died, how he’d been like when he had his episodes. _ It wasn’t her anymore. So I refused to be me. I just lay under what used to be my bed until I almost lost my mind. _

Some nights, tossing and turning under the covers, Lance could almost feel him below, hear the tiny hitches of breath he used to make when he got worked up. But every time he gave up and leaned to look under the bed, there’d be nothing there. When the ache in his chest became too much, sometimes he’d even crawl under the bed and lie where he’d once lied with Keith, thinking that maybe if the boy was there, the closeness would help. 

Lance’s mama complained when he left the blankets under the bed, but even after three months he couldn’t bear to take them out.

Even Shiro was worried about him. In spite of never becoming too close, they were still friends, or at least that’s what he liked to think. When Keith had still been around, Lance always invited him to the house so they could see each other. That’s why when Lance realized Keith was still appearing to Shiro, he couldn’t help but resent him for it and even decided to confront him about it.

_ Please _ , Lance had never been above begging.  _ Can’t you just ask him why? _

_ I know why _ , the man had said, and Lance could tell he felt bad about it.  _ But he asked me not to tell you.  _

_ Is it because I kissed him? _

Shiro’s silence was enough of an answer.

_ Can’t you just… I don’t know, tell him we can forget about it? I don’t care if he doesn’t like me, if he… if he didn’t mean it… _ Lance did care, but he didn’t tell Shiro that.  _ I just want to see him again. I miss him.  _

_ I’m sorry, Lance. _ Shiro put a hand on his shoulder, and he couldn’t help but lean into it. He could understand why Keith trusted him so much, the man just made him feel stable.  _ If it means anything, he still cares about you. He’s worried you’re not sleeping. _

That meant Keith still watched him. It made him happy even if he knew it was inevitable, as they were living in the same house. It made him a little paranoid, like those first days so long ago, feeling like there were eyes on him, that there was someone beside him or even sitting at his desk.

After the third month came and went, Lance got angry. He’d been feeling sad and miserable for so long it was starting to make him sick, so one day he decided he just wasn’t going to be sad anymore. 

As soon as school ended, he went on a bender, stayed out of the house as much as he could and only got there to face plant into his bed and sleep, and sometimes not even that. Lance got drunk like he hadn’t in a while and went to every party he could get invited to or sneak into, flirted with every girl and boy that caught his eye. One day when his mom went out with some guy she’d met, she even let him invite friends over. 

Lance drank and laughed as hard as he could, wanting to show off how good he was doing, how he wasn’t lonely anymore. He even invited a girl named Lily from his Spanish class, the one he’d flirted with trying to get over Keith. She sat on his lap through the games they played, and later he brought her up to his room to fool around.

Or at least that’s what he’d wanted to do. 

As soon as Lily jumped on the bed, he heard Hunk calling him downstairs about a broken glass. Lance, being the horny teenager that he was, gave her a quick kiss and rushed down the stairs to throw a broom at Hunk as fast as he possibly could, which is why he didn’t hear them laughing drunkenly about how the glass had just  _ flown _ from the table  _ out of nowhere _ , and Pidge saying how it  _ must’ve been a ghost _ , which was followed by a short silence and maniacal laughter from the pair.

But as he rushed back up, before he had even reached the top half of the stairs, Lily was walking out of his room with her arms crossed, glaring at him as they met in the middle.

_ Where you going?  _ Lance sneaked a hand up to her waist but she slapped it off.

_ Why didn’t you tell me your brother was here? _

Lance laughed.  _ The hell are you talking about?  _

_ Your creepy brother, idiot.  _ She’d shouldered past him.  _ The pervert just stood there in the middle of the hallway staring at me. You should tell him to get out more, he was pale as a sheet.  _

No one was home. There was no way Lily had seen someone unless…

Fucking. 

_ Keith _ .

The alcohol in his stomach and the frustration won him over then, and Lance stood in the corridor and screamed and banged on the walls like a madman, cursing his head off until Hunk came up to see what the fuss was about.  _ Come the fuck out you coward, _ he yelled, not realizing tears were running down his face, trying to fill the loneliness with words.  _ How dare you let her see you and not me? How fucking dare you? You’re an asshole, I hate you! I wish I’d never moved here and I wish I’d never met you! _

Thankfully, Hunk dismissed it as the ramblings of a confused drunk man. Still, Lance remembered the morning after, and the walls of his home had become a hall of mirrors for his walk of shame.

But it had been a long time since that night, and his anger had long since run out since then. 

Now he was just tired. Tired of feeling sad, tired of waiting and asking for answers and praying. As many feelings as he sparked, at his core Lance still missed Keith, even if the longing didn’t consume him like it’d done once before. Now it was more like a small scar, hidden away below his shirt where no one else could see it. Much like Keith’s own scar, he couldn’t show and tell, couldn’t really process what had happened with anyone but Shiro maybe. It was the only secret he’d ever kept, one that, after months of processing, he considered a good one.

It was hard.

As his family sang him happy birthday, he couldn’t help but feel bad, thinking Keith could be in the room with him. What would he feel watching Lance blow out the candles knowing he was a year older than Keith would ever be? How could he stand it? 

After, as they sat at the table making easy conversation, he noticed some of the snacks they’d left on the counter missing when he went back to the kitchen to get a glass of water. When he raised the mantle of the small table next to the window, he saw Sophia munching on a chocolate truffle and couldn’t help but smile.

“Can I sit here?” he gestured and she patted the spot on the floor beside her. After a while of watching her eat in silence, he asked her if it was a Kensley thing to hide under furniture.

“Not a Kensley thing,” she smiled up at him. “Just a Keith thing”

Lance smiled but inside he hurt, and as he sat back with his family, he wondered if he would ever see the boy again. 

"Still waiting for Juliet?" Veronica teased as he leaned over to blow out the candles.

"Always," he said, but he didn't see the worried look in her eyes when he didn't follow with the joke.

Lance closed his eyes and wished for Keith.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whatever could be coming, I wonder...


	8. October

Lance gave up by the end of September. 

Oh, but life.

Life had a way of giving you exactly what you wanted when you least expected it. 

It’s like Mr. High and Mighty way up in the clouds only got the notification when you finally understood the problem you were asking about, at the precise moment when you believed to have fixed it and were just reaching for the phone to delete the message before those two damn little blue lines blinked into existence. It was then that life spinned the line three times and threw one last bait into the water, waiting for that tiny particle of blood to drop into your lungs and fill every last functioning sense.

Life wrote back. 

_ You’re over it right? _ The bright red lure whispered, hanging lively from the sharp metal impaled through its heart.  _ You’re over it so come and get me.  _

Maybe it was more like a reward, a giftcard shyly given on your birthday wishing you good luck. 

_ For your patience, _ the faceless person would say.  _ You deserve it. Go. _

Seven months had come and gone, checked their stamp and abandoned their posts.  _ Lucky number seven,  _ he thought later that night.  _ Lady luck’s taking care of me. _

Lance was lying in his bed when it happened, recently woken up from a nightmare when he noticed there was something off. 

Seven months and he still remembered the feeling when they stood in the same room, had tracked down and mentally imprinted on the soft breathing and footsteps after walking next to them so long, the subtle iciness that followed after him like the shadow he didn’t have. 

He’d forgotten, but he remembered.

When he turned to reach for his phone, the first thing Lance thought was that he was surely dreaming. He’d had dreams like this before, where Keith would come to him in the night and pull him out of the bed and to the floor, hold his face carefully under the wooden frame. Lance would wake up in the morning with an aching back and neck, hand outstretched and reaching for something that wasn’t there. 

Lance knew it wasn’t a dream because Keith wasn’t alone. He was standing over him, that damned Pepsi Cola shirt hanging off his frame as Bella’s tiny hand fisted on the collar, even in her sleep. He knew it wasn’t a dream because Keith didn’t pull him out of the bed, only tucked his sister’s face close to his neck and crawled over to lie down next to him, settling over the naked bed in the summer heat, exposed for once instead of hiding under the darkness and safety of the bed.

There were so many things he could say, so many things he’d wanted to say for so long. There were questions to answer and wounds to seal shut.

Lance let the boy pull one of his shaking and unbelieving hands to his face, and he could feel tears prickling at his eyes from the sheer emotion that touching Keith after so long brought. It made him sad too, brought up every night he’d held pillows close and dreamed they held him back. It made him frustrated, the anger tugging at his most instinctive self, begging to choke the pale neck so close to his hand until he was satisfied with the words that spilled from the mouth above. 

And over that, over the burning desire to scream  _ why _ , Lance was so unbelievably happy, happier than he’d been in a while. He wanted to kneel and kiss the very ground Keith had walked over and say  _ thank you _ again and again to whatever deity allowed him to feel Keith’s lips on the palms of his hands, to dig his fingers into the dark mess of hair and pull him close, close, until the boy’s nose and forehead pressed together to his like a reflection, breath and legs tangled together under Bella like vines. 

As he thought of what to say and as he thought of how to say it, Lance fell asleep.

  
  
  
  


* * *

When he woke up, his first thought again was that he was dreaming. 

Even after remembering what happened at midnight, Lance was doubtful. The probability of waking up to Keith’s face so close to his had become completely null in his mind, and as much as he wanted it to be real Bella was no longer between them, which made it harder to tether the image in front of him to something concrete. The boy was watching him steadily, and as he opened his mouth to ask if whatever was going on was really happening, Keith proved it. 

As soon as he realized Lance was about to open his mouth, his hand, which had been curled up between their chests, quickly pressed his mouth shut. 

He was real.

“Can we please not talk about it?” 

The iciness of Keith’s fingers was heavenly in the summer heat, the temptation to just do as he said too strong against the risk of denying and losing him again. But even in his morning haze, Lance frowned and protested, even if his protest manifested as holding onto Keith’s wrist and kissing his palm like the boy had done hours before, pulling it off in the process so he could speak.

“It’s been seven months,” was all he said, and Keith at least gave him the dignity of not denying it. 

“Do you remember the last thing I said to you?” he asked.

Lance knew he was being distracted, that Keith was throwing the bait far from where he wanted his attention to be. 

But it was impossible not to run after it. 

“I remember”

“Can’t that be enough?”

Lance wanted to say it was. “No,” he replied instead. 

Keith smiled. “I imagined that’s what you’d say”

“Will you tell me then?” 

_ Why did you disappear? Why did you scare Lily? Why does Sophia keep saying you’re sleeping? Why do you see Shiro and not me? Why have you come back? What changed? _

_ Why, why, why. Is it too much to ask? _

“I swear I’ll tell you,” Keith said, searching his eyes for something. “But please… can we just do this?” he shifted closer, lips ghosting over his, watching him so intensely. “I know it’s unfair, but I promise it’s the last thing I’ll ever take from you”

Lance didn’t answer, considering. It was hard, with Keith’s hands clutching onto his neck like a life-line, burning his stare right through him. _ It’s been seven months, _ is all he could think, over and over.  _ I’ve been hoping for this for seven months. _

“Please… only for a while,” Keith kept whispering. “I’ll tell you anything if you just give me time”

And then he kissed him. 

It was the first time Keith had initiated anything, and there was a string pulling at his heart with the action, thrumming in his chest spelling out SOMETHING’S WRONG SOMETHING’S WRONG SOMETHING’S WRONG right along the love that was bursting through his veins at full pressure.

But Keith was kissing him.

_ I’ve waited for seven months _ , he thought as he held Keith back, pulled him under his body like he’d been wanting to do from the very start.  _ What’s seven days compared to that? _

  
  
  
  


* * *

They don’t talk about how stupid what they’re doing is.

It’s as if nothing changed. 

Lance would wake up early in the mornings to hold Keith before going to school late, after run back home like a starving man reaching for his oasis. He’d gone back to sleeping like an insomniac, staying up with Keith in Bella’s room and holding him until he couldn’t stand anymore, sometimes so long he’d fall asleep on the nursery’s floor. 

The days went past like they’d passed once before, only this time they sat closer and turned the movies off sooner, choosing the fantasy of each other instead of the one onscreen.

Keith was different now, too. He was like a drug, determined to hog his attention like Lance hogged the covers in winter nights, demanding every second they coexisted. When before he’d been shy, he was now confident, pulling at Lance’s hands how he wished, a puppeteer playing with new strings. Keith took up more space in the room, as quiet as he’d always been and trapping Lance with him in the spell.

The episodes seemed to have disappeared completely, like it was at the very start. Now when they lay under the bed it was by choice, holding each other amidst the blankets Lance left there every day.

Keith told him little things about the time he’d been gone, tiny comments that spilled unprompted, as if he was compensating for the questions he hadn’t answered yet.

_ I lay here a lot of nights,  _ he confessed one day as they made-out under the bed.  _ I couldn’t feel the blankets, but they kept me warm. _

_ I was behind you when you blew out the candles on your birthday cake,  _ when Lance was cleaning the plates as he sat on the counter beside him.  _ Happy birthday, Lance. I’m sorry I’m late. _

_ One day I sat beside you on the bed while you were sleeping. I almost woke you up. _

_ I was so jealous that day… I knocked a glass to the floor following you around. _

_ When I saw Shiro talking to you, it made me so sad... but I knew I had to stay away. _

Lance couldn’t take it anymore by the end of the week. 

Even if he’d been having fun, it was exhausting trying to avoid the subject, impossible refraining from asking Keith questions every time he commented on anything. Lance had one foot on paradise and one foot firmly planted on hell and it was driving him crazy. He tried to hold on with everything he had, tried to stop the fire from consuming him, but as friday came around again and there was only one day to go, Lance opened his bedroom door and couldn’t stop the words from escaping him.

“I can’t keep doing this,” Keith’s smile turned down as he said it, and though it hurt Lance forced himself to go through with it. 

He kneeled on the edge of the bed, a hand outstretched and beckoning. “Come on. It’s only ‘till tomorrow” 

Lance closed the door and stood in front of him, held onto his face so he couldn't avoid looking into his eyes. “I can’t, Keith,” he said again.

A flash of something crossed the boy’s eyes then, something sad and angry and hurt, but the look was gone almost as soon as Lance took notice of it, as soon as Keith pulled him down and kissed him.

“Keith,  _ no _ ,” Lance protested, even if he was kissing back, even as Keith pulled him down on the bed on top of him. It took all of his willpower to do so, but he pushed his face away and held it there. “Keith,” he tried again.

But then Keith’s hands got lower, somewhere they hadn’t been before.

“What are you doing?” Lance tried to stay serious, but his body betrayed him, breath becoming shorter and heart beating louder. 

“What I’ve wanted to do since you gave me those shirts,” Keith pulled him closer. “It’s been so long… Come on. Make me feel real”

How could he say no to that?

Even if common sense told him it was a bad idea, Lance did as he asked. It wasn’t the most amazing sex he’d had, but it hit him the hardest. As cliche as it sounded, Keith made it feel like the first time, like their biology was something more than what is was. In that moment, if only for a while, Keith’s skin wasn’t cold against his, wasn’t as pale as it’d always been. He’d asked Lance to make him feel real, and for a moment as they moved against each other, Keith was.

That’s why it was so devastating when it ended. 

Lance breathed against the pillow Keith had been lying in, pulling it close to his face as his body calmed down and breathing in the faint scent adhered to the material, hoping it wouldn't fade. Keith was shaking beside him, an arm thrown over his face, his breathing getting faster instead of slowing down. Turning to face him, Lance leaned over and pulled at his elbow, telling him quietly to  _ breathe, just breathe  _ while pushing his face up.

When he calmed down enough, Lance asked him  _ what’s wrong _ as he pushed away the strands of hair sticking to his face, worried he was having an episode. Keith’s eyes looked desperate as they made contact with his and suddenly he was shoving and shifting until he was sitting on the edge of the bed, arms crossed tightly over his chest. 

Lance tried to comfort him, worried something was seriously wrong, but the third time the boy shoved his hands off he’d had enough.

“What the fuck is the matter with you?” he snapped. 

Keith mumbled something indecipherable. Lance asked  _ what _ three times before he finally turned to face him.

“It’s not fucking fair!” he yelled. “The matter with me is that it’s not fucking fair, Lance!”

“That’s rich coming from you,” Lance laughed incredulously. Was he being serious right now? 

“Fuck you”

Something in Lance snapped.

“Fuck me?” he started. “Fuck  _ you, _ Keith. You know what’s unfair? What’s unfair is you leaving me for seven fucking months and then coming here out of nowhere asking me to forget about it like it’s easy! Like I-”

“I’m told you-”

“-didn’t wait for you for so fucking long and cried for you like an idiot hoping you’d come back! Like you didn’t hear me all those times I talked to you and didn’t answer. How dare you-”

“Stop it!” Keith looked so hurt but he deserved it. He deserved everything he was saying and he was going to  _ listen _ .

“No! Don’t tell me it’s not fair when all you do is take and take and give nothing back! Don’t act like you don’t know how I feel about you, like any of this- like it’s fucking normal! Like you didn’t break my heart and then walked all over the pieces asking me to kiss you and fuck-”

“You’re leaving!” Keith screamed, and that stopped Lance in his tracks. 

_ What?  _

“I came back because you’re fucking leaving and you’re right! Is that what you want to hear? You’re fucking right! I’m selfish, okay? I disappeared because I didn’t want to hurt you but I did and I… I didn’t know what the fuck to do! And then she said you were leaving and I thought-”

“Who said I’m leaving?” Lance tried to ask, but like he hadn’t listened, now Keith wasn’t listening either.

“I thought maybe I… I don’t fucking know… that maybe I deserved some happiness?” he was slowing down, panting, energy running out. “But I was wrong… all I do is hurt you and I can’t…” and then his body started leaning and leaning and suddenly Lance was the only thing keeping him from falling, keeping his head from lolling like a drunk.

“Keith…” the boy finally looked at him, eyes blinking slowly.  _ I’m tired, _ Lance remembered him saying so quietly.  _ I’m tired… so tired…  _

“You’re moving in October,” Keith whispered. Lance’s heart stopped. “I heard your mom... you’re moving. I need you to help me, Lance… Shiro said it’s okay… you have to help me”

“What can I do?” but his eyes kept staring off. Lance had to know before he was gone again. “Keith,  _ look _ at me. Tell me what to do”

And then he said it.

“You have to save me,” Keith smiled. “I need you to kill me”


	9. Moving Out

Lance always thought that when he’d die, he’d die with his lover.

It was always a fact for him, ever since he could remember.  _ I’ll go to school, I’ll go to college, I’ll meet the love of my life, we’ll get married, we’ll have kids and then we’ll die together. _

As he grew up, he started to realize how unrealistic that was, a million pessimistic ‘what if’s interrupting his fantasy. 

_ What if I never find my beloved? What if they die before me? What if I die before them? _

It finally dawned on him when Keith asked him to kill him.

That night he had a dream where they were older but looked the same. Lance had done something bad, had betrayed the world for Keith and they would be punished for it. But their death penalty wasn’t an electric chair or the gallows, not the lethal injection or a stake to burn in. 

What waited for them was the beach: Lance's favorite place in the world. All was quiet except for the sound of the waves. Keith was standing beside him, a hand on the crook of his shoulder, smiling all dressed in white. His lips were moving even though no words came out.

It didn’t feel like a punishment. Lance felt like he was walking down the aisle to an altar, not to his death.

A faceless man, _ the executioner, _ Lance thought, led them to the waters. He pulled them through the waves and the current with an invisible rope until their heads were miles under the surface and the oxygen started to run out.

_ This is what I want, _ he remembered thinking, a brief sense of peace washing over him. _ This is what I’ve always wanted. _

But his body started to panic, pushing his mind over the edge with it until he was struggling to swim back to the shore. _ I don’t want to die _ , Lance kicked and screamed, and when he finally reached the sand, he took a breath so hard it made his whole body ache, coughing and spluttering water that had become black from the rot inside him.

_ I’m not dead, _ he comforted himself.  _ Oh god, I’m not dead but _ -

When he looked back to reach for his lover, Keith was already too far down, bubbles spilling from his mouth like tears, the last of his life going up up up while he sank like a rock down and down and down, hand reaching for him in a last attempt to take him down with him like they  _ promised _ , like it was  _ supposed to be _ . 

Lance reached and reached but it was impossible to go back in. Every time his face sunk under the water got in his mouth and in his ears and he couldn’t. He couldn’t breathe and  _ oh god, what have I done, oh god Keith I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry I couldn’t die, oh god, we were supposed to go together- _

Lance woke up crying.

It was saturday again. The week Keith had bargained for had ended. Their seven minutes in heaven were over. Lance just wanted to go back to sleep, maybe bang his head against the bed frame until he knocked himself out and forgot about everything that had happened. Until he forgot about Keith and his impossible wishes…

But life wasn’t kind to him

“Hey, Lance?” Veronica knocked until he groaned. “There’s someone at the door for you”

After dragging himself out of bed and throwing on a shirt and pants, Lance obediently went to the door. 

“No,” he said as soon as he opened it and saw Shiro standing on the other side. “I’m not doing it”

The man looked at him sadly. “It’s not your choice”   
  


“And it isn’t yours either,” he went to close the door but Shiro was stronger than him, holding it open, forcing Lance to confront the situation.

“We have to talk”

They sat and talked, and as the minutes went by, Lance started to feel more and more cornered, more and more ashamed and disgusted at himself and helpless because as Shiro talked, it was hard not to listen and impossible not to understand or agree.

_“_It would be like killing him a second time_,_” was the only thing Lance could think to say, the only argument he had. “We can’t kill him, Shiro. It’s not right”

And then Shiro explained.

“Keith doesn’t sleep,” was what he started with. It was like a punch to the gut, and Shiro just kept talking. All of his kindness was gone, a seriousness like Lance had never seen before replacing it. “He waits around all day for you to come home like a dog. Sophia doesn’t grow up so he’s always taking care of her. You never see the twins around but they always bother him, always run around making a mess because they’re bored. They’re miserable souls Lance, and not just because they’re traumatized but because they  _ hurt _ ”

“Hurt?” Lance was going to be sick.

“The stab wounds never close even if they look like they’re scarred. He knows how to hide it but it’s harder everyday because appearing to you, to  _ us _ , drains all of his energy. It’s why he’s always tired”

Lance remembered Nicholas and Abigail, how they’d been around for the first two years and then just disappeared. It made sense Keith was exhausted after almost five, he was pushing the limit already, bending it as much as he could.

This was it breaking.

“You’ve seen his episodes,” Shiro continued. “What you haven’t seen is how bad they are. They may look sparse, mostly gone even. But that’s because he hides them well. Every week I’ve come to visit he’s been weaker, sometimes he’s barely there at all and… and he’s always… he cries”

Lance didn’t know how to feel. What to think.

“You’ve made him so happy, you truly have, but it’s just not enough,” it hurt. It hurt even though he knew it was true. “I know you love him, how the hell do you think  _ I _ feel?” 

That was the first time he’d head Shiro swear. 

Hell. Such a ridiculous little word. Four letters was the last it took to make it dawn on him.

This wasn’t some love story where he was the protagonist, this was plain horror, tragic in every angle you looked at it, and comedy just for the irony. Everything rolled into one.

Like Marissa and Stephen Kensley. _ _

_ Life is a wheel _ , Lance remembered reading somewhere _ . It comes back around. _

“You’ve been with him for a year and he was gone for half of it. I’ve known him since he was  _ fourteen _ Lance, and he should be twenty-six. I watched him grow into an amazing person and then… then he was just gone. Ever since he came back five years ago he’s tried to be happy, to live like this but it’s just too much. He’s tired, Lance, and it’s not fair”

“Why didn’t you do it before, then?” Lance tried to keep the frustrated tears at bay but it was hard. He felt helpless. “If it’s so bad, why haven’t you killed him yet?”

“Because I convinced him,” Shiro looked so ashamed, every single drop that Lance felt reflected in his eyes too. “Every day he was miserable and I convinced him to stay because I was selfish. Selfish because I love him, selfish like you. When the episodes started… I knew it couldn’t go on. Watching him look so empty, so…” 

_ Dead _ , is what he meant.  _ Looking at his ghost as it should be _ . 

“Before you moved here I was going to do it. I had everything ready, just like we’d planned”

“What happened?”

Lance knew even before he said it 

“You moved in,” Shiro smiled. “There was no way to do it while you lived here. We were going to wait, he was just going to disappear again, go to that awful place like the first years he was… and then he met you”

Shiro’s words sounded like they were underwater, like there was a filter between them he couldn’t quite shake. 

“Your family brought the house back to life like it hadn’t been in a long time, made everything real. Bella gave him a purpose at night, and the twins finally had something to do other than to mess with him. And you… you made him feel everything he never felt, everything he couldn’t feel”

“Then why doesn’t he want to stay?” he asked, feeling like a child with every word he said, wiping at the tear-drops before they even dropped. “Or...I don’t know. Why can’t you just do it when I’m gone?”

“Because he’s selfish too,” Shiro said plainly, sadly. “Because he doesn’t want to do it because he’s sad you’re gone, doesn’t want to risk wanting to wait for you to come back. He wants to…” he swallowed. “He wants to do it while he still feels alive”

It was breaking his heart all over again.

Shiro was right.

That night, just like he’d done so many times before, like he wouldn’t be able to do forever maybe, Lance walked to Bella’s room in a daze.

It was just like that first night, and just like the last night before Keith disappeared too. The only difference was that when Lance went to hold him, Bella wasn’t as little as she’d been before, and this time he knew Keith would hold him back, that he wasn’t going to be around for much longer.

With shaking hands, Lance pressed their foreheads together and whispered  _ okay _ . 

  
  
  


* * *

When his mama finally broke the news to them, Lance didn’t have the heart to even pretend he was surprised. 

The last weeks he spent on the house went by slowly, every second stretched out into a million tiny frames as he forced himself to be present, to enjoy the place he probably would never see again. Ever since Lance agreed to help Keith, they had a silent agreement not to talk about what was going to happen, not wanting to taint the time they had left together. 

A selfish part of Lance wanted to distance himself, to run as fast and far as he could so the separation would be easier, but that cowardice lost to the intense desire to make Keith’s last days good, to make the transition as peaceful as it could be. They were mostly quiet, spending lazy afternoons enjoying each others presence, dozing as the weather turned colder by the hour. 

It was hard seeing Keith’s body fading away day by day, hard to ignore the way his fingers sometimes dipped into his skin like ice, harder to keep the smile on his face when Keith stopped talking altogether, almost as if he was mourning the life he had left before it was even over. 

Lance just held him and hoped that for once, just this once maybe time would be kinder, go slower.

It didn’t.

When he told his friends at school about the news, they gave him sad smiles and good wishes even if he wasn’t gone yet. It had only been a year since he first moved in, but he’d made good memories there, formed bonds he would never forget. The last day he attended school before the weekend he’d move, Hunk hugged and twirled him like a damsel and Pidge gave him a small hug, significant as it was the only hug they’d ever shared and most likely the last one too.

As he hugged her back, she asked if he’d said goodbye yet.

_ I’m saying goodbye right now,  _ he’d said confusedly into her hair.

_ I meant Keith _ . Lance wanted to be surprised but he wasn’t.  _ That night at your house. There was no wind and the glass just shot out from the middle of the table. I thought I was drunk because I saw a shadow following you around but then you started yelling about someone not appearing to you and wishing you’d never moved here and it just made sense.  _ she explained with a shrug.  _ Did you think you were being subtle? _

Lance laughed. Pidge was the smartest person he knew, of course she figured it out.

_ So have you said goodbye yet? _ she asked again.

_ Not yet _ , he answered and then, after considering,  _ have you ever seen...? _

_ Yes _ , Pidge said. She didn’t bother to explain. Maybe she’d tell him some day.

That night they decided to do it the day before he moved out. 

Shiro said it would be better, something about killing two birds with one stone, and Lance agreed because he couldn’t think of another way to go about it. So the day before he left, just as midnight came around, Shiro and him navigated through piles of boxes all over the floor until they reached the backyard.

Standing before the gazebo, he almost laughed at the image they made. 

Lance was holding two shovels, Shiro had a lever in one hand and a box of tools in the other and Keith was standing on the other side of the small construction, smoking with an empty bag swung over his shoulder and Bella sitting lazily on his other arm.

When she saw them, the baby babbled through the scarf covering her mouth, put there by Lance to protect her from the dust that would soon settle over them, and they all took a deep breath before getting to work.

Instead of destroying the entire structure, they only lifted the boards in the middle wide enough to start digging. Keith sat on the wooden rails holding a flashlight as they dug their shovels deeper and deeper, the smoke from his cigarettes combined with the white light making the gazebo look like it was immersed in fog. 

It was faster than Lance thought it would be.

As soon as the shovel struck  _ something _ they all stopped. Keith hopped off the rails and peered down as they brushed the dirt away to reveal-

“That’s Nick,” Keith said in a small voice, more curious than scared.

When the smell hit, Shiro climbed out of the hole and threw up on the grass.

Lance coughed, barely holding his own vomit and calling the man back to start. They took their time methodically picking up and putting the bones and old clothes in the bag Keith held open beside them. 

For one lucid second, he wondered if Bella would remember the moment years later, maybe as some weird dream.

As they reached the bottom, Lance held his breath as he plucked out a familiar pink dress, holding the small bones beneath it as carefully as he could. It was hard not to cry at the sight, but the dam broke as soon as he saw the old black shirt beneath, Shiro joining him as they pulled out the remains of Keith’s body, the last of the pile. 

“That’s me,” was all Keith said, and then he didn’t speak for the rest of the night.

Shiro promised to come back for the bag the next day and they all went to get some sleep.

As Lance limped out of the shower, arms and hands aching from the strain, Keith was already in his bed. He didn’t have the energy to cry anymore, slumping down beside him as if he was a corpse himself and burying his face into the cold chest before passing out.

* * *

  
  


The moving truck was already outside, Veronica and Luis pushing the last of their bags into the car.

Lance and Keith stood over the fixed gazebo, spending their last moments together. He’d already said goodbye to Sophia, and the girl waited inside as Shiro chatted with his mama to buy them some time as they said their own goodbyes. 

As he looked at Keith standing before him, looking as real as Lance’s own skin and bones, he didn’t know what to say.

Keith did. 

It was as if he’d been saving his breath for the last three weeks.

“I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time now,” Keith started slowly. His hands rose to his face, fingers ghosting over his cheeks and tracing his eyes and finally settling on his jaw. “But I never imagined it would end like this”

Lance held onto his wrists, needing the contact to ground himself in the moment.

“I’ve been thinking of how to tell you… how to tell you how much you mean to me.” Keith sighed, closing his eyes for a moment before looking back at him. The blue lining his iris was the part of him Lance was was sure he would remember the most. “Do you remember the day you got here?”

He nodded. “Just before halloween”

“October twenty-seventh. Just like today,” a pause. “My birthday”

“Keith,” he could feel his heart breaking beneath his chest, and if he’d had any tears left, Lance would’ve cried.

“It’s alright,” Keith assured him, somehow stepping closer into his space. “I didn’t know it then, but meeting you was the best thing that could’ve happened to me. You coming here and  _ this _ , this last thing… they’re the best two gifts I could’ve asked for. You gave Sophia and I an unforgettable year, a year we… a year I can’t thank you enough for”

“You don’t have to thank me,” Lance said.

Keith laughed and it made Lance smile. And then he remembered it was the last time he’d hear the boy laugh and the sadness consumed him again.

“You make me feel real, Lance. You always have,” Keith leaned in so their lips were almost touching. “Before you came into my life, everytime I closed my eyes I felt so lost because touch and smell and sound had become so… so muted. But you… right here I’m with you and it’s like I was never gone, like it was all just a bad dream or… or maybe like  _ this _ is the dream. Like someone or something is saying sorry and letting me have this...have  _ you _ , if only for a while. A perfect dream”

Lance didn’t know what to say. “I love you,” he whispered.

“I know. But I need you to move on.” Keith smiled. “I want you to remember me like this: like a good dream. A dream one day you’ll fall asleep and stumble back into, and I’ll be right there”

“I’ll miss you,” because he wouldn’t be able to tell him after, because Keith needed to know.

“You can come find me,” Keith searched his eyes. “But you have to promise me it’ll be in a long, long time”

“I promise I’ll do. I  _ swear _ ”

“I know,” Keith said one final time. “But now it’s time to wake up”

Lance closed his eyes and kissed him, pulling him as close as he dared, wanting to remember the feeling of Keith’s hair through his fingers, the way the boy’s hands clenched on his shirt and his body melted against him, their lips moving together.

And just as easily as he was there, he was gone.

The moment Lance opened his eyes, Keith had disappeared, vanished from his arms like a magic trick he didn’t have the chance to follow. Like smoke.

Lance walked in a haze, through the house and into the car, the controls of his body set on automatic so he wouldn’t freeze still like a broken toy. His neck was tense all the way, wanting to look back in an attempt to catch one last look and needing to look forward at the same time. Shiro hugged him goodbye and told him he’d take care of it, that it was the right thing. 

All he could think of was Orpheus and Eurydice.

As he sat in the car, Luis passed Bella over, and he pulled her to his chest like she would’ve done her blanket, needing the comfort of something familiar. But she was squirming too much, trying to look over his shoulder as his mama started up the car. 

“Keef!” she whined, reaching for the window behind them. “Keeeeef!”

Lance tried to resist the temptation but it was impossible, and his eyes flicked to watch the rearview mirror, trying to get a glimpse.

It was barely for a second, could’ve passed for a trick of the light, but Lance knew what he saw. It was Keith, finally out of the house, standing in the middle of the street with Sophia hiding behind his leg like the very first time.

“Say bye-bye, Bella,” Lance said to his baby sister, not caring that his family would think he was insane. “Bye-bye Keith”

“Bye-bye, Keef,” she repeated, and his mama celebrated at the new word for only a second before she started to cry.

_ Like a dream, _ Keith had said _ . Remember me like a good dream. _

Lance closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep. 

And he slept and he dreamed. 

He saw himself walking down a cemetery, a bouquet of white flowers spilling from his hands. In the dream, he found Keith’s grave, tombstone leaning between Vivian’s and Sophia’s final resting place, between the people he’d loved the most, between the people that had loved him the most. 

In case someone or something was watching, Lance crossed himself before he put the flowers down, remembering that year he’d spent in a haunted house.

Like the last dream he’d had, Lance was older but felt just the same, and as looked at the engraved names, the memories flooded his brain. He could remember the paranoid feeling of someone watching him, the confusion when he found books and CD’s in places they weren’t meant to be. 

Most of all, he remembered lying in his room with a hole in his chest, knowing the only person who could fill it was sleeping under the bed.

Everything but the tomb disappeared, and Lance lay down on the grass as he’d once crawled under the wooden frame, closing his eyes for a moment before he felt something there.

_ You found me _ , Keith said close to his face, an icy hand landing on his cheek.  _ You found me. _

And Lance would kiss him, knowing if he opened his eyes Keith would be gone once again.

_ I found you, _ Lance prayed.

When he woke up they were at the new house. As they climbed out of the car one by one, their mama took Bella from his arms. They all held their breaths as she opened the door and walked inside. 

Bella started to cry.

Lance couldn’t help but laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its been a fun ride.

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a kudo or comment if you liked!
> 
> Have a nice day!


End file.
